Watching Cartoon Network in the 1990’s was a treat, but watching in the midnight hours was like being a part of a secret club. A club where animation that didn’t look or act like anything else was the secret password. Each day and year offered different packaged anthologies and curated blocks to experience. Curated showings included Late Night Black & White which contained early 20th century American animation, ToonHeads explored the history of the golden age of American animation, and early Toonami showed off anime. But one in particular has left an outsized impact; O, Canada! This half hour block showed off a compilation of classic animated short films from the Great White North. Unbeknownst to me at the time they were all a product of the the National Film Board of Canada’s animation division, a government sponsored animation powerhouse which modestly came out of the mission to “help Canadians in all parts of Canada to understand the ways of living and the problems of Canadians in other parts”. You too may have seen shorts produced by the board if you attended early Spike & Mike programs or watched any International Animation Day programs. Still in operation today, the NFB’s long history is intricately important to animation, both creating works and giving space to artists across many disciplines and exposing generations of audiences the world over to the lives of experiences of Canadians.

Last November animation historian Charles Solomon, author of many fantastic animation history books, but most recently The Man Who Leapt Through Film: The Art of Mamoru Hosoda (2022) and the upcoming The Art of Cartoon Saloon: 25 Years: The Official Retrospective of the Award-Winning Irish Animation Studio behind The Secret of Kells, Wolfwalkers, and Song of the Sea (July, 2026), has published through Harry N. Abrams a thorough and explorative history of the NFB in, Animation for the People: An Illustrated History of the National Film Board of Canada.

This book is divided into seven chapters and subsequently the history of the film board into roughly decade chunks – from the creation of the NFB and first leadership by John Grierson and the creation of the animation division led by Norman McLaren in 1943, to as recent as the end of the COVID Pandemic in 2022. Each chapter explores notable films and the history of the artists who have made their presence felt through their art.

The artistic and aesthetic variation over 80 years from the NFB is simply staggering. There are so many different types of animation that it may be useful to have an internet browser open to the National Film Board’s fantastic streaming website as you read through. The work of Norman McLaren and the artists around his orbit like Evelyn Lambart, René Jodoin (who would eventually lead a French animation division for the NFB), and Grant Munro, would come to characterize the early output, but the willingness of everyone on staff to learn from what was happening across the film world, often modestly and novelly evolving the craft, became a characteristic of the organization itself. Lotte Reiniger’s presence in the 70s working on her final film, The Child and the Enchantments, is a powerful example of how renowned the board had become as a space for artists. Technology would often be integrated and explored for its artistic potential, often beating other institutions in using new methods years before others would create, like Peter Foldès using a computer in the 1974 short, Hunger. Solomon often points out how the NFB leans into using new technologies that can promote the capabilities of the individual artist, especially pointing out the unique capacities of pinscreen animation and its creators, Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker.

Another aspect that Solomon often points back to throughout the text, which ran through McLaren’s intention for the studio, was that the NFB allows and encourages artists to operate as their own independent creator – that the space the NFB created was a space with modest tools to create educational, informative, and artistic expressions that would otherwise not have been. While not opposed to group projects, the preference to give individual artists the space, through legislative governance, to create their own specific vision cannot be overlooked. The hypothetical has always existed, what if we could give artists the opportunity to create within a certain amount of freedom and eight decades of awards and nominations show us what can be accomplished.

The history of the National Film Board is complicated for many reasons – its lengthy history, the vast number of artists who helped cultivate its diverse and overwhelming output, the financial and political challenges to its structure – but Solomon does a fantastic job guiding us through the history one step at a time. The text is written letting readers piece together broader significance and applications, but doesn’t fall prey to the banal of meaningless figures and dates. We move quickly through topics as if moving through a curated hall; each page is full of photos, animated artifacts, and objects with Soloman gleefully pointing out each artist’s creation’s curiosities, uniqueness, and lineages. When important, Solomon will explore the government structures that provided the foundation for the board or political challenges, but the focus is on the myriad of fantastic animation and the people who made it.

The last two decades of the NFB have been marked by progression and instability. As Solomon explains, the constant attack from within the Canadian government has hurt the capabilities of the board, but unionization, gender parity, and new distribution models have helped bolster the ways in which the organization treats the artists that help make it what it is. What will the NFB produce in the next eight decades? If history has anything to say, then we will be shown thoughtfully animated, razor sharp, and authentically Canadian animated shorts for years to come.

Animation for the People: An Illustrated History of the National Film Board of Canada is written by Charles Solomon and is published through Harry N. Abrams and is available now.

Please dive in and enjoy the complete Animation History Bibliography section of the Cartoon Research website. See you next month with another round up of animation book news and reviews!