Street Musique(Movie, 1972)

Street Musique is a 1972 animated short film by Ryan Larkin produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). It is a line animation of "music as performance", in which actions of the film's characters are choreographed to the music of street musicians. Soon after returning from the 42nd Academy Awards in 1970, for which his animated short film Walking had been nominated, Larkin was loaned by the NFB to a Vancouver art school, where he stayed for eight months conducting animation workshops. He would travel to each student's studio to direct them, one of which was a group of street musicians. These street musicians were the origin of the idea for the film, as Larkin had stated that "they would make a great focal point for my abstract images". The film consists of five or six vaguely defined segments whose animation matches the pace of the music to which it is set. It begins with a photograph of a musician that is replaced by a line drawing of that photograph. A transition leads to images of a man's body transforming into abstract improvisational forms using line shading and watercolours. The figures undergo a continuous metamorphosis throughout the film. Chris Robinson stated that the ... ()