Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

McLaren’s line has the calm certainty of someone who’s watched “the rules” of a medium get rewritten in real time. “Film is changing” sounds observational, almost neutral, but the second clause flips it into something like a manifesto: “it can’t help but keep changing.” That phrasing isn’t about trendy innovation or box-office cycles; it’s about inevitability. Film, for McLaren, is less a set of conventions than a living technology, and living technologies mutate under pressure from tools, audiences, and artists who refuse to sit still.

The intent is gently polemical. McLaren made animation by drawing directly on film stock, treating celluloid not as a window onto reality but as a surface to be played like an instrument. From that vantage point, change isn’t a threat to “real cinema”; it’s the engine of cinema. The subtext is a critique of gatekeeping: any attempt to freeze film into a single definition (narrative feature, photographic realism, studio polish) misunderstands what the medium actually is. Film’s identity isn’t purity, it’s permeability.

Context matters here. McLaren’s career runs through the era when film moved from silent to sound, black-and-white to color, theatrical to broadcast, and from industrial product to avant-garde laboratory (especially in places like the NFB). His sentence reads like a preemptive rebuttal to every panic about new formats. Film will keep changing because it’s built to be remade - by chemistry, by machines, and by restless human hands.