What McLaren did, he didn't always do first, but he almost always did it best -- animating characters by painting them directly onto the film strip, creating wild and vibrant abstract films by running paint rollers down the emulsion for tens of feet at a time, performing single-frame animation on real people in outdoor settings, synthesizing sound by drawing directly onto the optical film soundtrack, or deconstructing dance choreography through blurring or composites so that a dancer could duet with his own afterimage. All this was suffused with a whimsy and creative fearlessness that marked McLaren as an artist who was truly open to all that surrounded him.

McLaren was born in Scotland in 1914, and was a painter from an early age. He still thought it would be his life's work when he entered the Glasgow School of Art, up to the moment he saw the work of Oskar Fischinger. Thereafter he shot and edited several Eisensteinian silent films, including Camera Makes Whoopee, which qualified for the Scottish Amateur Film Festival in 1936. The festival's adjudicator was John Grierson, long-time advocate for documentary film in Britain. Grierson hired McLaren to come work for him at the General Post Office film unit in London. If you've forgotten the Zen pleasure of watching a good educational film, the delight of watching letters get from anxious parents to their sons on board naval vessels via cars, bags and assembly lines in McLaren's GPO film, News for the Navy (1938), it will come as an early treat on disc one of the box set.

Jammin' with Oscar: Begone Dull Care (Caprice en couleurs) (1949).

McLaren shot documentary footage on the Republican side during the Spanish civil war in the late 1930s. Convinced, as he was that he wouldn't be able to face more of that kind of devastation, he heeded the storm clouds over Europe and immigrated to New York in 1939. Meanwhile, Grierson had been hired by the Canadian government to head their first film commission, and Grierson invited McLaren to join the National Film Board in 1941. In short order McLaren helped found the animation department at NFB.

McLaren's NFB career lasted more than four decades. This new box set collects not just his NFB work, but every McLaren film that survives, which, thanks to the dedication of the artist himself, includes almost everything he ever did. All his best-known shorts for NFB are here, including Hen Hop, La Poulette Grise, Begone Dull Care, Neighbours, Blinkety Blank, A Chairy Tale, Le Merle, Canon, Pas de Deux, Spheres, Synchromy and Narcissus. His student films and documentaries done before he left the U.K. are also included, plus tests, documentaries about McLaren and some exuberant home movies.

Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition is a bountiful box of seven DVDs with an 84-page booklet in "flip" style to accommodate English and French liner notes (each printed upside-down of the other, so that both start from the outside and meet in the middle). There's 875 minutes of material here to consume, and the producers intentionally ordered this eclectic filmmaker's oeuvre thematically rather than chronologically to aid digestion. This does mean that material, which fit in more than one category, is sometimes repeated from disc to disc; but it hasn't unduly increased the box's footprint, which will take up less than two and a half inches on your shelf, and the price is pretty darn reasonable for seven discs (major retailers stock it for about $70).

After NFB talked about making a McLaren collection for some 20 years, it finally happened with consultant and McLaren protégé Don McWilliams guiding the restoration process.

Don McWilliams is a filmmaker/educator who knew McLaren and his films well, and served as a guiding hand behind NFB's efforts at researching, structuring and digitally restoring McLaren's life's work. Animation World Magazine spoke to McWilliams from his home in Montreal about McLaren and the 20-year quest to get the master his own box.

Taylor Jessen: Throughout Norman McLaren's life he was a major stylistic influence all over the world but, in America at least, he's no longer the star he once was.

Don McWilliams: No, not in Canada, either. (laughs) During the '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s, he was a major figure internationally. Toward the end of his career, I think he disappeared from the public consciousness. At the time that he became so well known, he worked within the institution of the National Film Board, which had access to world markets, so the work was always seen. Columbia Pictures distributed all of the NFB films automatically for many years. And then in Canada in the '60s, the film industry started to grow outside the confines of the National Film Board, which was the major training institution for all the young filmmakers, and you had people like Gilles Carle and Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg appearing.