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       Jacques Drouin, who died suddenly on Aug. 28 of an aneurysm at the age of 78, was a legend at the National Film Board of Canada and a revered figure in the international animation community.

       Caroline Hayeur/National Film Board of Canada

       “Unique” is an often-misused adjective, but it certainly applied to Jacques Drouin. For three decades, the late Quebec animator was the only artist in the world practising the intensely intricate technique of pinscreen animation. Like a medieval monk in the studios of the National Film Board of Canada, Mr. Drouin toiled alone on the pinscreen device – a delicate creature bristling with 240,000 movable steel pins – to create magical short films that resemble fluid engravings.

       Mr. Drouin, who died suddenly on Aug. 28 of an aneurysm at the age of 78, was a legend at the NFB and a revered figure in the international animation community. Ascetically lean with a stack of wavy dark hair, he seemed to fit the monastic image: He was gentle, humble, with the infinite patience required of his painstaking art.

       But he was no monk outside his studio cell. An NFB team player, Mr. Drouin often served as an editor on his colleagues’ films and delighted in fraternizing with them. He was also a loving husband, father and, more recently, doting grandfather.

       He and his wife, Suzanne, kept an open house at their summer residence in the historic village of Kamouraska, Que., where they welcomed friends going as far back as Mr. Drouin’s student days at the old école des beaux-arts de Montréal.

       “Their hospitality was second to none,” said former NFB producer Marcel Jean – now managing director of the Cinémathèque québécoise – recalling visits filled with good food and good talk. In a tribute published on the Cinémathèque’s website, he joyfully declared that Mr. Drouin “savoured life!”

       Mr. Jean is among the colleagues who reference the conclusion of Mr. Drouin’s 1976 masterwork, Le paysagiste (Mindscape), in which a young artist becomes immersed in the world of his own painting, only to finally cross back out of the frame and return to reality.

       “That’s Jacques deciding not to have a life absorbed entirely in his art,” said fellow animator Michèle Lemieux, Mr. Drouin’s pinscreen successor. She said he had witnessed the workaholic habits of Norman McLaren, the NFB’s visionary head of animation, who lived 24/7 in the studios, and rejected them. “Jacques was able to be an artist who was very much involved in his work, but to also draw a line and have a family and social life as well.”

       Mr. Drouin was born on May 28, 1943, at Mont-Joli, Que., to Eugène Drouin, a bank manager, and Marie (née Ranger), a nurse. Although his father wanted him to become a dentist, young Jacques followed his artistic leanings and enrolled at the école des beaux-arts. After a six-month job at Montreal’s seminal Expo 67, where he was wowed by the fair’s showcase of experimental animation, he headed to Los Angeles to study film at UCLA.

       After graduation, Mr. Drouin spent some time in New York, where he saw the already-classic short Night on Bald Mountain by husband-and-wife filmmakers Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker – the first movie made using pinscreen animation. It was, in the words of Suzanne Drouin, le coup de foudre – love at first sight. “Jacques’s first coup de foudre,” she added, laughing. “I was his second!”

       Mr. Alexeieff, a Russian engraver, and Ms. Parker, an American engineer, had invented the pinscreen in the 1930s. It consists of an upright vinyl screen perforated with thousands of tiny pins that, when fully inserted, make a blank white picture. But when the pins are pushed out from behind, at varying lengths, and lit from the side, they cast shadows. The further the pins extend, the deeper the shadows.

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       By using the various gradations and pressing upon the pins with a variety of tools, the animator can create richly textured images. Ms. Lemieux says the pinscreen’s design is so precisely calibrated that the shadows in the upper right corner can emulate the look of a Goya engraving, while those in the lower left suggest the cross-hatched drawings of Georges Seurat – two of Mr. Alexeieff’s favourite artists.

       As well as Bald Mountain, Mr. Alexeieff and Ms. Parker had created a handful of other pinscreen shorts and, most famously, the haunting prologue for Orson Welles’s 1962 film of Kafka’s The Trial.

       In 1943 – by happy coincidence, the same year as Mr. Drouin’s birth – they’d been invited to the NFB to shoot their second pinscreen film, En passant. Mr. McLaren was among their biggest fans and, after years of effort, persuaded the couple to build a pinscreen for the film board and, in 1972, return to Montreal to demonstrate it.

       By then, Mr. Drouin had also come back to Montreal and, a year later, scored an internship with the NFB’s French Animation Studio. At that point, the pinscreen was languishing unused (no other NFB animator had the temperament to work with it). He took to it immediately and, with Mr. McLaren’s blessing, made a test film, Three Exercises on Alexeieff’s Pinscreen.

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       Mindscape won 17 awards and honours, as well as the approval of filmmaker Alexandre Alexeieff, who attended its premiere at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 1976.

       National Film Board of Canada

       He then confirmed his mastery of the instrument with Mindscape, an elegantly surreal journey into an artist’s protean psyche. The film would go on to win 17 awards and honours, as well as the approval of Mr. Alexeieff, who attended its premiere at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 1976.

       Mr. Drouin was eventually employed full-time at the NFB. He had met and married Suzanne, a teacher, in 1972, and the couple were raising two sons. When not creating his own projects, he worked on those of his fellow animators. He was the editor of Co Hoedeman’s 1978 Oscar-winning short The Sand Castle, among other films. He also made animated sequences for various NFB documentaries.

       After Mr. Alexeieff and Ms. Parker died in the early 1980s, Mr. Drouin became the sole animator using the pinscreen. He experimented further with the device, making more award-winning films. For the 1986 short Nightangel, he collaborated with Czech animator Bretislav Pojar to create a dreamy hybrid of pinscreen and puppet animation, in which he also bathed the normally monochromatic pinscreen with coloured lighting.

       Ex-Child, a blunt 1994 short about a boy soldier made as part of an educational series on children’s rights, was less satisfying. More sophisticated was A Hunting Lesson (Une le？on de chasse), his 2001 film based on the children’s story by Jacques Godbout, in which Mr. Drouin tamed his restless imagination to tell a traditional, narrated tale. He may have felt it too restrictive, however, for he followed it in 2004 with the frenetic Imprints, a work of pure visual play, which gleefully pivoted between both sides of the pinscreen and revelled in its metamorphic nature.

       “After Une le？on de chasse, I think he needed to just explore the instrument with a lot of freedom and you can feel it in his last film,” said Julie Roy, the NFB’s director general of creation and innovation. After Imprints, Mr. Drouin retired from the film board. To celebrate his legacy, Ms. Roy produced a DVD box set, Jacques Drouin – Complete Pinscreen Works, in 2009, which included a 40-minute documentary on the filmmaker by Guillaume Fortin.

       Mr. Drouin passed on the pinscreen to Ms. Lemieux, who proved a worthy successor with her superb 2012 film Here and the Great Elsewhere. Mr. Drouin continued to give international masterclasses in the pinscreen and, along with Ms. Lemieux, restored the only other working model, acquired by France’s Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) from Mr. Alexeieff’s daughter.

       In recent years, Mr. Drouin continued to make films as personal projects, including one about his father and another on his mother that remained unfinished at his death. For his own amusement, he also built a miniature pinscreen using toothpicks. Suzanne Drouin said he was always happily busy, as engaged with living as he was with creating, just as he had determined in Mindscape: “I know he would have said that he had a wonderful life.”

       Mr. Drouin leaves Suzanne; his sons, Mathieu-Félix, an assistant cameraman in film and television, and Alexis, a furniture maker; and granddaughters, Maxine and Delphine.