Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

McLaren’s line reads like a gentle law of nature, but it’s really a manifesto for how he thought images should behave: not as silent decoration, but as instruments. Coming from an artist who literally drew and scratched sound onto film, the claim isn’t metaphorical so much as practical. He’s pointing to a cross-sensory instinct most viewers already carry - we “hear” shapes before we can explain why. A circle suggests glide, breath, continuity; a jagged edge suggests impact, friction, threat. Animation, for McLaren, is the art of weaponizing that instinct.

The specific intent is almost pedagogical: a rule-of-thumb for crafting audiovisual coherence. If you want a lullaby, don’t animate it with knives. If you want a jab, don’t wrap it in bubbles. The subtext is sharper: harmony is not just a musical outcome, it’s a design choice, a moral choice even. Smoothness becomes a kind of civility; angularity reads as conflict. That bias matters because it reveals how easily formal qualities get smuggled into meaning. We’re primed to treat “rounded” as safe, “sharp” as aggressive, long before narrative arrives to justify the feeling.

Context makes the line feel prophetic. Mid-century modernism was obsessed with fundamentals - color theory, gestalt, the grammar of perception. McLaren is staking a claim that cinema’s grammar isn’t only visual. It’s synesthetic: shape, motion, and sound form one sentence, and the punctuation is geometry.