Animator Robert Verrall belonged to a legendary NFB team of creative filmmakers

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In his decades-long career at the National Film Board of Canada, Robert Verrall worked as an animator, director, producer and administrator. To those official descriptions should be added an unofficial one: ally. As the NFB’s director of English production, he oversaw the creation of Studio D, the world’s first government-funded studio for feminist filmmakers. He also helped launch the career of Alanis Obomsawin, Canada’s foremost Indigenous documentarian.

“He was the first one to give me a contract at the film board, in 1967,” said Ms. Obomsawin, best known for the multi-award-winning Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, a powerful account of the 1990 Oka crisis. Mr. Verrall would go on to produce many of her films and support her vision at a time when ignorance and prejudice against Indigenous people were rife. “Unlike other people, he never tried to change my message or dictate how things should be done,” she said.

“He was one of the giants of the film board,” added veteran director Paul Cowan, another of Mr. Verrall’s protégés, whose often-controversial docudramas included an account of Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s battle for abortion rights and an iconoclastic take on First World War flying ace Billy Bishop. “I always thought that Bob Verrall embodied the spirit of the NFB better than anybody, in whatever position he had,” Mr. Cowan said. “He was one of those guys who wanted you to dream big, be crazy, and take chances.”

Mr. Verrall, who died on Jan. 17 at Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital at the age of 97, was also known for his gentle presence, his wry smile and his playfully conspiratorial air.

“He did everything with a twinkle in his eye,” Mr. Cowan said fondly. “If there was anybody who was a kind of magic elf at the film board, it was Bob. He could have been a character in one of his animated films.”

Robert Alan Verrall was born on Jan. 13, 1928, in Toronto to Evelyn (née Sneddon) and Arthur Verrall. He showed a talent for drawing at an early age and studied graphic art at Western Technical-Commercial School. It was there that one of his teachers introduced him to visiting NFB animator George Dunning. Mr. Dunning, impressed with the teenager’s portfolio, in turn recommended him to his boss, Norman McLaren, who was seeking interns for his burgeoning animation department.

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Mr. Verrall spent the summer of 1945 at the NFB’s Ottawa studios, headquartered in a converted sawmill by the river. It was the tail-end of the Second World War, the film board was feverishly pumping out newsreels, and Mr. Verrall apprenticed under Evelyn Lambart, Mr. McLaren’s famed collaborator, learning how to animate maps of troop movements.

“I was put under her wing – a very fortunate thing,” Mr. Verrall recalled in a 2012 interview for the NFB series Making Movie History. “She became my teacher, taught me the first basics of animation.”

A year later, he was back in Ottawa as a full-time member of the animation department, embarking on what would become a 41-year career at the NFB. That now-legendary team was small but bubbling with creativity and Mr. Verrall quickly took to its experimental ethos. An early triumph came in 1952, when he and fellow animator Wolf Koenig dreamed up The Romance of Transportation in Canada, a comical trip through the country’s history of conveyance, from the canoe to the car. Directed by Colin Low, it went on to win the prize for best animated short at the Cannes Film Festival and earn a nomination for an Academy Award.

In the 1960s – by which time, the film board had relocated to Montreal – Mr. Verrall moved up to producing. His credits included such NFB classics as Jeff Hale’s The Great Toy Robbery, Les Drew and Kaj Pindal’s What on Earth! (another Oscar nominee) and Yvon Mallette’s Boomsville. He also directed a classic of his own, Cosmic Zoom – a sublime illustration of both macro- and microcosm that pulled viewers out to the furthest reaches of the universe and then plunged them back down to the level of atomic particles. But by the time of its release, 1968, Mr. Verrall had been named head of the NFB’s animation department and much of his energy was focused on enabling the creativity of other artists.

Among them was the avant-garde animator Pierre Hébert. Mr. Verrall hired him in 1965 and then produced his NFB directorial debut, the 1968 educational short Population Explosion. “I was a very young filmmaker at the time, with quite radical ideas about animation,” Mr. Hébert said. “I’m still grateful that he let me go and do what I wanted. He was very open-minded.” When Mr. Verrall asked him who he wanted to create the film’s musical score, Mr. Hébert boldly suggested the great jazz innovator Ornette Coleman. Mr. Verrall knew nothing about the jazz scene, but gamely suggested they head down to New York and ask him. As a result, Mr. Coleman composed and performed an ineffable soundtrack to accompany Mr. Hébert’s cut-out animation.

Continuing up the ranks, Mr. Verrall was appointed to run English production in 1972. During his four-year tenure, he supervised the NFB’s expansion to Toronto and Winnipeg, and the establishment of both Studio B, devoted to drama, and the landmark Studio D. The latter, founded and piloted by Kathleen Shannon, would end up producing some of the agency’s most daring and celebrated films. In 1977, Mr. Verrall became executive director of special projects and in 1980, took over the running of Studio B.

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Throughout, he continued to champion young talent. Mr. Cowan recalled how Mr. Verrall backed his then-bold proposal for Going the Distance, his Oscar-nominated film of the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. At the time an aspiring Toronto filmmaker who had done camerawork for NFB sports documentaries, Mr. Cowan wanted to direct an official feature on the Games that bucked the trend. “Unlike the kind of sports films that were being made up until then, which emphasized who won and who lost, I wanted to make a story film,” Mr. Cowan said, which would instead follow eight of the competing athletes.

Mr. Verrall loved his unconventional approach, but they had to sell it to an NFB committee. “It was made up of the heavy hitters of the film board and we were really grilled on what we were going to do,” Mr. Cowan said. “I felt they were pretty negative about it.” As they left the meeting, Mr. Cowan was convinced they’d been rejected, but Mr. Verrall smiled and simply said, “We won.”

“He never told me what he meant by that, but he was right – we got the film,” Mr. Cowan said. “That was the way Bob worked. He had this sly sense of humour and a very canny mind. He could size up a situation and figure out the way to proceed forward with it.” Mr. Cowan said he remains eternally thankful to Mr. Verrall for trusting his vision. “He took a big gamble on a young kid who hadn’t done much. I didn’t know it at the time, but over the years I came to realize what a risk that was for Bob.”

Mr. Verrall wasn’t only committed to creative freedom, but also to bringing underrepresented voices to the film board. His long association with Ms. Obomsawin began when, as a young Abenaki singer-storyteller, she gained national attention for leading a fundraising campaign to build a swimming pool on the Odanak reserve in Quebec, where she grew up. Mr. Verrall and Mr. Koenig met with her and hired her as a consultant on a film about a Sioux women’s cooperative in Saskatchewan. When Ms. Obomsawin said she wanted to make her own films to educate Canadians about her people, she got Mr. Verrall’s full support, starting with her first effort, 1971′s Christmas at Moose Factory, shot at a residential school in northern Ontario.

“Bob was always present and he never argued with me about how I wanted to do things,” Ms. Obomsawin remembered. “He respected me and I respected him.” Their working relationship blossomed into a close friendship of more than 50 years.

Sometimes Mr. Verrall’s support of talent extended outside the studio. In the 1950s, at the height of the anti-communist witch hunts, he and his family took in Gretta Ekman, a gifted animator who’d been forced out of the NFB for her alleged left-wing associations. “I’ve spoken to many people over the years who’ve held him in high regard for showing that kind of commitment,” said NFB historian Donald McWilliams, who included Ms. Ekman’s story in his 2024 documentary A Return to Memory.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Verrall became involved in the NFB’s co-productions of dramatic feature films, including a couple of literary adaptations: Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute, directed by Claude Fournier, and Timothy Findley’s The Wars, helmed by ex-Stratford Festival artistic director Robin Phillips and featuring Stratford stars Brent Carver, Martha Henry and William Hutt.

He retired from the NFB in 1986 but continued to be sporadically involved in film. His last producing credit was Ms. Obomsawin’s Professor Norman Cornett, a 2009 documentary on the divisive Montreal academic. He also continued to supply artwork for her projects and those of other NFB colleagues. He even took a six-month etching course so he could replicate the techniques of Baroque engraver Jacques Callot on camera for Mr. Low’s 2000 doc Moving Pictures. “I thought it was amazing that he’d gone to such lengths just so he could do this etching for a few minutes in a film,” said Mr. McWilliams, who witnessed the shoot.

Mr. Verrall met his wife, Marion (née Easun), as a fellow art student in Toronto and they married in Ottawa when they were both 19. The couple raised a large family, including a daughter, Tamarack, and five sons: David, Paul, Norman, Michael and George. David became an NFB animator and producer like his father, eventually running the board’s English Animation Studio.

Predeceased by Marion, who died in 2010, Mr. Verrall leaves his children, as well as eight grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and a sister, Dorothy.

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