Two men about to go to war over a flower in Neighbors (Voisins) (1952).

TJ: I caught the program in Los Angeles when it came down this fall, and I was amazed. McLaren had an uncanny knack for creating an innovative new technique and the apotheosis of that technique in the same film. His maiden voyages have become the definitive examples, the things so many artists are still trying to live up to.

DM: I do these workshops -- I call it "The Unknown McLaren," and I go and show tests and some of the finished films, and spend a lot of time discussing his synthetic sound, which pre-dated the synthesizer. It's interesting the reactions I get from young filmmakers. Last week I did it in Montreal, and a fellow came up to me afterwards -- he was a musician who's now studying film. He was stunned. He said, "This is amazing stuff, and I've never heard of this! Why have I never heard of this?"

TJ: The first time I saw Begone Dull Care it just made me burst into laughter at the end -- the smash-bang glee of flashing one line of credits on the screen for every eighth note in Oscar Peterson's last piano run. The concept pops and the execution pops, and together it's too beautiful. There's joy in these shorts that 60 years can't kill.

Battling a willful mike stand in Norman McLaren's Opening Speech (1961).

DM: It's the great jazz film, I think.

TJ: And his technical standards were almost unmatched. Dozens of optical elements in any given shot of Pas de Deux, multiplying the dancers on the screen, and still no gate weave and no dust. Watching that for the first time on this DVD, someone might think, "Ah, that's been digitally restored," but it hasn't, has it?

DM: That actually is from the negative. That's not digital.

TJ: It was that clean in 1968, which is extraordinary. How are sales going so far?

DM: My understanding is that they're going very well. I think it was a simultaneous release in Canada and the United States. And now some distributor in Europe has ordered 2,000 copies. There's a great deal of optimism about how well it's going to do.

TJ: I know it'll be a boon for a lot of animation fans who know about McLaren but haven't seen the bulk of his work. Voilà, here it is -- the whole shebang.

DM: I remember, in 1982, I went to Turin for a weekend retrospective of McLaren's films, and there were these Italian animators -- Bruno Bozzetto, Gianini and Luzzati -- who had made The Thieving Magpie and some others. They got up and showed their very first films. And the thing was, apparently the young Italian animators saw Disney, and they thought it was great, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came these films from this man in Canada. (laughs) And it was fascinating because all their first films were direct copies or influenced by McLaren.

She will lay a pretty little egg: La Poulette Grise (1947).

I remember Gianini's first film was totally handmade -- and he never made another handmade film in his life! And Bruno Bozzetto made a little anti-war film with chess pieces, which was inspired by Neighbors. (laughs) The innovation and the eclecticism and the freedom he had in the way he worked just caught their imagination. And, even though their later work isn't as abstract -- I mean, look at Bozzetto's films, they don't have much relation to what McLaren was doing -- McLaren's films were the push that got them into finding their own voices, that showed them they didn't have to do the big-scale cel movie. They could be free and individualistic. And I think this always for me has been the great lesson of McLaren, that the sky's the limit.

Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition, seven-DVD box set, The National Film Board of Canada, 2006, 15 hours B&W, original version mono, NR, NFB ID Number: 183C9306410 ($99.95).

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. Here, everybody, I made brownies!