The Loon's Necklace (1949)

Interesting facts

• Based on: Blind Man and the Loon

The Loon's Necklace is a 1948 Canadian film, produced and directed by F. R. Crawley. It recounts the Tsimshian legend of how the loon received the distinctive band of white markings on its neck.

Production

Crawley shot the film in Quebec, with a local naturalist as his guide. He filmed the loons in their natural habitat, and used a combination of photography, cell animation and unusual colour and lighting arrangements to achieve the film's mysterious atmosphere.

The film is narrated by George Gorman and François Bertrand, and performed by actors in traditional West Coast First Nations masks in front of a backdrop of brightly coloured oil paintings. The masks, which represent emotion, are the original masks, 100 years old at the time, which were loaned to Crawley by Leechman. They are from the Bering Sea Eskimos, and the Haida, Nootka, Kwakiutl and Iroquois peoples.

The Loon's Necklace was produced by Crawley Films with a budget of between $7,000 (equivalent to $97,407 in 2025) and $10,000 (equivalent to $139,153 in 2025). It was made for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), which rejected it, so Crawley sold the Canadian rights for $5,000. to another of his long-standing clients, Imperial Oil.

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