Neighbours (French title: Voisins) is a 1952 anti-war film by Scottish-Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren for the National Film Board of Canada. In 1953, it won the Oscar for Best Documentary, Short Subject. Production The film uses pixilation, an animation technique using live actors as stop motion objects. McLaren created the soundtrack of the film by scratching the edge of the film, creating various blobs, lines, and triangles which the projector read as sound. Plot Two men, Jean-Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro (representing French Canada and English Canada respectively), live peacefully in adjacent cardboard houses. When a single, small flower (possibly a psychoactive flower) blooms between their houses, they fight each other to the death over ownership of that flower. The moral of the film is, simply, Love your neighbour. The moral is also shown in other languages, including (in order of appearance): Japanese: 同胞に親切なれ (Dōhō ni shinsetsu nare) Chinese: 親善鄰居 (Qīnshàn línjū) Hindi: आपके पड़ोसी से प्रेम पूर्वक व्यवहार कीजिए (Aapke parosii ke prem porvak vyavahaar kiijie) Urdu: اپنے ہمساءے دوستانی برتاؤ کرؤ (Aapne hamsaae dostaani bartaao karo) Arabic: اَحِب قَرِيبَك (Ahib qaribak) Hebrew: וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ (V'ahavta l'reacha) Russian: Любите ближнего своего; Lyubite blizhnego svoyego Esperanto: Amu vian najbaron Norwegian: Elsk din nabo Spanish: Ama a tu prójimo German: Liebe deinen Nächsten Italian: Amate il prossimo French: Aimez votre prochain Cast Jean-Paul Ladouceur as himself Grant Munro as himself Controversy Neighbours has been described as "one of the most controversial films the NFB ever made". The eight-minute film was politically motivated: "I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People's Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao's revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. (...) I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war." — Norman McLaren The version of Neighbours that ultimately won an Oscar was not the version McLaren had originally created. In order to make the film palatable for American and European audiences, McLaren was required to remove a scene in which the two men, fighting over the flower, murdered the other's wife and children. During the Vietnam War, public opinion changed, and McLaren was asked to reinstate the sequence. The original negative of that scene had been destroyed, so the scene was salvaged from a positive print