The Animation of Canadian Culture: Norman McLaren and the National Film Board
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is no worse title one could attribute to McLaren, as the press at times do nowadays, than “the Walt Disney of Canada”, which is understandable only as an attempt to attribute a genius comparable to that of Disney to McLaren. In fact, nothing makes him comparable to the “Wizard of Burbank”, indeed in many aspects McLaren represents to opposite of the Disney model (and American model generally) based on the mass production of animated cartoons. We may even interpret McLaren’s efforts to use the technical and expressive diversity of the NFB animation films as a stylistic code oriented to the intentional research into the non-standardisation with the dominant model in this field: the American cartoon. McLaren interpreted his own appointment to public service by making animated films at the NFB, starting from his own cinema, the “metaphor” of an irreducible identity, where not only the most diverse experiences and identities of animation live together but where every author is invited to experiment and dialogue with the other languages. In his research into animation cinema McLaren experimented and studied above all the specific nature of this medium: because animation cinema does not reproduce movement, it creates it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".