René Jodoin

In this Oscar-nominated animated short film, director Peter Foldès depicts one man’s descent into greed and gluttony. Rapidly dissolving and ever-evolving images create a contrast between abundance and want. One of the first films to use computer animation, this satire serves as a cautionary tale against self-indulgence in a world still plagued by hunger and poverty.

Blocks and balls fight simply because they are different, until their battle reduces everyone to the same shape.

This funny yet serious short film demonstrates the effectiveness of advertising and the marketing machine. Its comic appeal lies in the characters and the absurd situations they find themselves in, but it also shines a harsh light on our tendency towards needless consumerism prompted by a steady flow of commercials.

In this short animation film the triangle achieves the distinction of principal dancer in a geometric ballet. The triangle is shown splitting into some three hundred transformations, dividing and sub-dividing with grace and symmetry to the music of a waltz. The film's artist and animator is René Jodoin, whose credits include Dance Squared and several collaborations with Norman McLaren.

This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.

No description available.

Monsieur Pointu would like to play his fiddle. But the fiddle has other ideas.

This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.

This experimental short documents the clash, sometimes obsessive, sometimes glorifying, between humans and their mechanized environment. Using photographs, the animator creates varying perspectives through optical manipulation and changing colour, achieving bold and provocative effects.

Squares and other geometric shapes appear to "dance" along to music through their ever-changing movements.

A satirical, updated take on the classic Jean de La Fontaine fable.

This animated short co-animated by René Jodoin and Norman McLaren was produced for inclusion in the Let's All Sing Together sing-along series. It illustrates the popular song Alouette, gentille alouette. The technique used is single-frame animation of paper cutouts.

In this film, which takes place to the rhythm of Schubert's Military March, the point, this first form, by its multiplication and the chosen orientations, allows us to see how it can be chained to form lines, shapes, surfaces, to form ensembles that ultimately occupy the entire surface of the screen.

Humorous, full of unimaginable finds, this animated short invites the viewer to follow the antics of a horse trying to acquire a force equivalent to that of a horsepower.

A childhood fantasy where dreams carry a boy far to adventure. He arrives in Canada on an ocean liner and is, in turn, a hunter of polar bear, a cowboy, a hockey star, and a swimmer.

Musician and composer 'Claude Dubois' presents his view of the effects of the growth of urban areas, specifically industrialization and overuse of non-human elements resulting in a need to overly control how we as people live within this environment. Human images are interspersed with more controlled mechanized ones. Those human images are first free flowing, then floundering under that mechanization, then ultimately trapped into chaos or into death.

This film combines colour, animation and sound to clarify principles of radio wave transmission. It illustrates how antennas propagate radio waves and how they may be adapted to increase the bandwidth of transmissions. (The film was released for general use as a public service by the Royal Canadian Air Force.)

A child founds a strange ball.

Combining colour, animation and sound to clarify principles of radio-wave transmission, this film illustrates how antennas propagate radio waves.

Training film for the Canadian Department of National Defence.