Canada Day came and went, but it’s excuse enough for me to share one of Canada’s great short films.

There isn’t a whole lot to say about Neighbours that hasn’t already been said. If you are film school student, you’ve watched this, or at least you were supposed to. If you weren’t graced with the warm, comforting hug of those academic halls then you may be less familiar. Neighbours sits highly in the pathetically small Canadian film pantheon (you can tell it’s Canadian because there is a ‘u’ in ‘Neighbours’, see?). Although a short film clocking in at a mere eight-minutes, this adorably quaint story managed to sharply divide its audience and even its own producers. The founder of National Film Board of Canada (who produced this short) said this film made him distrust McLaren politically. That’s right, this simple story is also a pointed political metaphor against war—the flower is the insignificant, ultimately irrelevant catalyst to an escalated feud between two, formerly neighbourly neighbours.

It’s controversy springs from its wide generalization of conflict, but also its increasingly uncomfortable scenarios where our two assailants end up murdering each other’s families. This section was initially censored and cut, and the restored version doesn’t use the original negative, hence the lesser quality. But the wide-stroke approach really works here because it doesn’t identify with a specific war, but rather that nature of war itself—the constants. The bright colours and cartoonish style further inflict mixed feelings as it visually tugs one way, while intellectually, the other.

The techniques are pretty fascinating too. McLaren was a brilliant animator who takes what initially feels like a glossy, 1950’s TV-ready story and turns it into a bizarre, almost archaic style of primitive stop-motion, but with people who fly across the screen like out of a Looney Tunes short, stripped of most of its animation cels. The music and sound effects leave a lasting impression, as if predicting computer game beeps and boops decades ahead. McLaren inventively scratched the side of his filmstrip that reads audio to create bizarre “glitches” as its projected. The fact that he’s able to create a rhythm and time match is a testament to how much of a pure visionary he truly was.