Guillaume Côté on Frame by Frame, a tribute to pioneering animator Norman McLaren

When you sit down to watch an animated movie, have you ever thought about all the work that goes into making those drawings move? Back in the 1940s and 1950s, it all came down to what you could do with your hands, whether that was drawing, painting or physically altering the film. Norman McLaren was a Scottish-Canadian animator who started experimenting with this and making films with the National Film Board in the early 1940s.

One of his most famous NFB films ever, Neighbours, won an Oscar in 1953. It was an eight-minute film, that followed the life of two men who lived in cardboard houses. These became iconic images, connected to McLaren for decades. Now, there's a live production opening in Toronto that brings a lot of these images to life through ballet and theatre.

Guillaume Côté is a principal dancer and associate choreographer at the National Ballet of Canada. He teamed up with Robert Lepage, the Canadian playwright, actor and director, to create Frame by Frame, a tribute to the life and work of McLaren. Côté joins Tom Power live in the q studio to talk about the new production.

You can catch Frame by Frame the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto. It opens on Friday, June 1 and runs until Sunday, June 10.

— Produced by Tyrone Callender