A Little Play and Lightness 1 – Art for happiness

Does playfulness still have its place when the world burns?

Some artists specialize in films about the times. Howl’s Moving Castle was heavily inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s horror at the invasion of Iraq. The Hubleys used their animation to address nuclear war and widespread apathy. In Shanghai, the team behind Three Monks tried to heal divisions caused by the Cultural Revolution.

But there are great artists, too, who just want to delight. They treat their craft like a juggling act or a magic trick — something to excite, surprise, hypnotize. The end goal is an entertained audience: people come out the other side a little lighter.

Those films can enrich lives as well. They’re short breaks; they uplift. Watching them adds a little more joy to the day. One of our favorite examples is The Blackbird (1958), a short with no statement to make. It adapts an old Canadian folk song, sung in French, whose lyrics are nonsense. They tell of a blackbird that’s losing pieces of itself: its eye, its head. But it keeps getting restored.

“\[W\]hen the blackbird loses a part of his body he gets it back in triplicate. He loses his beak, gets back three,” noted the film’s director.1 And he visualized the nonsense with thrilling, lively animation that dances in time to the song’s rhythm and rapid lyrics.

It’s a tiny gem. It was also, sometimes, the type of film that bothered him.

__He has terrible feelings about that. He appears not to be convinced at some moments of the worth or significance of his non-social works. … MATHPH1XENDe is inclined at times, when his political feelings are very strongly engaged, to be highly critical of what is basically a non-political body of work. That is, his life work as a whole. … But I think that at other moments he would not believe that. He has thrown himself, one part of himself, so entirely into the making of these non-political films that even he would see that it is not a trivial involvement.__[5](#footnote-5 "5") Even when McLaren viewed them as just diversions, he took painstaking care with his films. He wanted them to be __good__. In the case of __The Blackbird__, he began to toy with the idea in the 1940s. Around a decade passed before he got it where he wanted it to be. s_!r9ZF!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F926a73c0-d7f5-496c-a520-7fd2f8b6d6e2_550x412.gif" alt="" />

The key problem with The Blackbird was the music. McLaren was commissioned to make a number of folk-song adaptations in the ‘40s, and the results were classics: La Poulette Grise, Alouette. But this one caused him trouble.

“The song was extremely rapid,” McLaren said, and this bird character needed to transform in time to the lyrics. He started by animating directly on film stock (his signature technique), but found it “all too clumsy and cluttered.” The bird couldn’t move quickly or cleanly enough to fit the song. So, he set the whole project aside.6

McLaren made a second attempt in the early ‘50s.7 Since that first “very fanciful-like Aztec bird” had been too complex, he simplified the design. And he used stop motion this time, manipulating a flat cutout made of “metal with joints and lots of parts.”

It was another dead end. “This is going to be hell, making this move!” he realized.

McLaren gave up again and directed his focus elsewhere: Blinkity Blank (1955), A Chairy Tale (1957). It would be years before he finally solved this one. As he recalled:

It was only in 1958 that I managed to obtain a drawing that was simple enough to be an ideogram. That allowed me to obtain the flexibility of movement and to follow all the metamorphoses of the decomposition of the bird. … By simplifying the drawing, I was able to make the bird do whatever I wanted while conserving its intrinsic characteristics as well as its biological details.

His final bird became almost abstract — a jumble of lines and dots that shuffles and reshuffles itself, with no settled form. It jumps, flies, dances and disintegrates with a sense of timing that could only be McLaren’s.

Working alongside him on The Blackbird was Evelyn Lambart. Throughout much of McLaren’s career, she was there, at times co-directing with him. “Many of my films would never have been possible were it not for the very close assistance and cooperation of this highly talented animator and artist,” he said.8

Here, Lambart fabricated the bird’s many pieces — “stiff white paper cutouts,” in McLaren’s words. He animated them over black (with her help, in the particularly intricate parts).9 The aim was animation that matched both the music and the imagery detailed by the lyrics. As he said:

… the rhythmic thing would be doing one thing and words would be doing another thing. To do a third thing, the picture, which integrated with the first two things, was very difficult.

They worked frame by frame under a camera. Cardboard pieces shifted; a photo was taken. A lot was spontaneous, and a serious mistake meant, most likely, restarting a sequence from scratch. It was a method influenced by Lotte Reiniger’s films — McLaren called it “an excellent technique for the animator.”10

Another form of animation occurs behind the bird. There, we find McLaren’s famous pastel trick. He would render an image slowly — adding or removing a bit of pastel, taking a photo and repeating. Played back, it’s like a painting that creates itself. Later in The Blackbird, he got special effects by zooming into his pastel images. Finally, in the lab, bird animation and backdrop were composited together.

The film isn’t even five minutes long, but it was reportedly a nine-month process. McLaren and Lambart needed real dedication to make a piece that’s so perfectly, unpretentiously what it is. The audience gets a brief moment of fun, humor and lightness — and then it’s over. At The Blackbird’s premiere, people were thrilled.11

Right now, the most important story in animation isn’t happening in Hollywood. Its location is Gaza, where artist Haneen Koraz and her team are holding animation workshops for children.

The project has been a refuge for some 1,500 students so far. In a film uploaded this week, We Won’t Leave You Alone, a few of those students expressed their experience of displacement. It’s a comedy about household objects, and in particular about a refrigerator that’s too big to escape out the door. The others join together to save it.

Koraz’s workshops are supported via GoFundMe and Patreon. Also backing them is a foreign organization co-founded by Joanna Quinn, the British animator. Its name is Animation Community for Palestine — and, today, it premiered To Gaza with Love.

The film is a three-hour anthology of animated shorts. People contributed from across the globe, including Quinn and Sam Fell (ParaNorman), and artists from the region. Animator Mohammed Hosam made his section, Normal Day in Gaza, in Gaza itself. As Quinn explained:

He animated and finished this film on his PHONE while living in a tent with his family in Gaza. All his possessions including his computer have been lost.

To Gaza with Love calls for peace and freedom, and it “aims to show Palestinians — especially Gazans — that they are not forgotten,” says Animation Community for Palestine. It’s also a tribute to Koraz and her work. In a statement, Koraz described the anthology as “a powerful act of solidarity,” and quoted her students as saying, “These films are like gifts from the world to us.”

See it on YouTube below:

2.2 – Newsbits

• In America, Michael Eisner attacked Disney for its recent capitulation to the government. “Where has all the leadership gone?” he asked.
• An upcoming book, The Art of Cartoon Saloon: 25 Years, will cover the films of Ireland’s most famous animation studio. It’s due next year.
• In France, Cartoon Forum took place this week. It’s a crucial pitching event in Europe’s co-production system, and Kévin Giraud (The Animation Belgian) looked at the standouts of 2025.
• Canada’s Nishant Jain (The SneakyArt Post) is a fellow newsletter writer we’ve known for years. In a few days, Quarry Books will release his guidebook for sketch artists. He calls sketching on location “a way to actively engage with our world.”
• In another story from Canada, Denver Jackson’s near-solo feature film The Worlds Divide is free for a limited time.
• In its second weekend, Infinity Castle remained on top of America’s box office. It’s now the highest-grossing Japanese animated film in the country. Around the world, it’s totaled more than $555 million — the new record for anime.
• The Italian podcast Under the Onion Skin spoke to Eva Matejovičová about her film Writing Home, which we enjoyed a lot last year.
• In America, SpindleHorse (of Hazbin fame) unionized with The Animation Guild.
• In Japan, the Sourcebook of Sherlock Hound will gather production materials from that classic series. It’s set for release in October.
• Australia’s Felix Colgrave shared a new compilation of his Paper Loops series.
• In Russia, work continues on Alexander Petrov’s feature The Prince, animated with paint on glass. It’s now planned to wrap in late 2026 and premiere in 2027.
• Last of all: we wrote about the blacklist of the 1950s, and an obscure cartoon that provides a window into that era.

Until next time!

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