Neighbours

Neighbours is a 1952 anti-war film by Scottish-Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren. Produced at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, the film uses the technique known as pixilation, an animation technique using live actors as stop-motion objects. McLaren created the soundtrack of the film by scratching the edge of the film, creating various blobs, lines, and triangles which the projector read as sound. Two men, Jean-Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro, live peacefully in adjacent cardboard houses. When a flower blooms between their houses, they fight each other to the death over the... ownership of the single small flower. Neighbours has been described as "one of the most controversial films the NFB ever made". The eight-minute film was politically motivated: "I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People's Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao's revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war.
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