Hello, everyone! I’ve been given the opportunity to see some shorts produced by the NFB that will be screening in SPARK this weekend! This is your reminder to squeeze some animation between your Halloween-mandatory revelries and sinful deeds. The first is screening in a block tonight, and I hope to see you there! Here are the reviews.
But, really, the short answer is both were great and very Canadian, and of course you should go see them.
Shop Class
Dir. Hart Snider
Man, I was not prepared to go flying back to the exact headspace I occupied from Grade 7-12. It was uncomfortably easy, reminding me how psychologically close we all are to those days, no matter how ‘grown up’ we think ourselves now. (For the record, I don’t think of myself as a grown up. How can I when I still don’t entirely grasp what ‘chard’ is and how to incorporate it into daily life?) Shop Class captured the inner narration, fear of humiliation, and the existential dread of having your worth as a human being tied to a letter grade. A warbled narration from voice actor Fred Ewanuick takes us through director-writer Hart Snider’s experience of Shop in juniour high, despite having more interest in Home Ec - which is as girls-only as Shop is boys-only. Driving home that gender division is the dreaded Mr. P, a man who grades your machismo alongside your craftsmanship. He’s also voiced by Fred Ewanuick, a performance that is at once funny and terrifying, as every word sounds like he’s gritting his teeth to keep from punching yours in.
The story is recognizably Canadian and universal, but it's hampered by some lackluster design decisions. The background characters are pretty run-of-the-mill and lack authenticity. There's the bully with a torn jean jacket, the girl who bats her eyes and never speaks, a few incidentals who fail to leave an impression. The story is told in such a genuine way that you believe its events, even when Mr. P’s sadism reaches ridiculous heights. But having such rote side characters takes some of that away and makes things feel more artificial. I assume the creator didn’t want to implicate real people who are shown in less-than-favourable light in the short, but I do wish he’d tried for designs and acting that didn’t feel so generic. It’s especially grating because the short itself is about how stereotypes are inhibiting and regressive, and having such cliches seems hypocritical.
Luckily, Mr. P takes up a lot of slack. He's a memorable tyrant because he looks like an over-indulgent Santa Claus squeezed into an office shirt and tie. You can tell that a lot of his most toxic behaviour comes from his frustration with his position and failure to live up to his own masculine ideals.
Animation-wise, it leaves much to be desired. When Mr. P first makes his entrance he’s forced to squeeze through a door too small for his overwhelming physique. This should be a moment that’s both hilarious and a memorable introduction to how the students see him. Yet the gag plays out lifelessly, without pushing the drawings or timing. While the character designs and art style are fine on their own, they do not integrate into the backgrounds, which are heavily rendered and charmless. The best-looking sequence is the climax, where a more unique mix of 2D and 3D elements creates a maelstrom out of paper cut-out clouds, a tower of stone, and Mr. P achieving his true ambition of becoming a vengeful thunder god, complete with lighting effects. It makes you wish that the overall look of the film was similarly inspired.
All that said, I really like this short. It managed to be funny, authentically juvenile, and a little subversive. It's just that its likability leans heavily on the charm of the narration and voice work, while the animation didn’t bring its A game to match. It's worth seeking out for the short glimpses into Mr. P’s psychology - a big man trying to be bigger even when surrounded by children, with a hidden fondness for ‘girly’ activities like calligraphy. It paints a fascinating man who has more in common with our awkward protagonist than would first appear.
Also, Mr. P - it’s funny how concerned you are with manliness in your class, considering Shop, when a verb, is often associated with the other gender. Ah, stereotypes...good thing this is a period piece and we don’t have to deal with that sort of thing nowadays, eh?
Animal Behaviour
Dir. David Fine and Allison Snowden
SPARK : Opening Night Shorts (Darn, I guess I missed that…it’ll be around, though!)
Well, obviously, I have to plead Conflict of Interest to the court in this case, as I am in the credits. So I’ll just say ‘See it if you love me.’ There. That’s hardly manipulative or underhanded.
But seriously, even after working on this short over a couple years, it still makes me laugh. That’s gotta count for something.
The Zoo
Dir. Julia Kwan
The Zoo is directed by the filmmaker behind Eve and the Fire Horse (2005) and Everything Will Be (2014). It’s a dialogue-less short that draws parallels between the twin abandonments of a bear at a defunct zoo and an elderly Chinese man being pushed to the fringes of a gentrifying Vancouver. It’s a thoughtful correlation. We’re briefly shown the childhoods of both characters. As a cub, the bear is captured in the wild after the death of his mother, while the little boy (the larval stage of an old man) makes a ritual out of taking his family photograph in front of the cub’s exhibit. Flash forward to the future and the zoo is closing, with all the animals relocated. All except the ancient polar bear, who is too infirm to go along with them. After years of noise and company, he is now left utterly alone.
I went into the film blind and did not realize that the bear is based on a real figure. Tuk the Polar Bear was the last remaining animal at the Stanley Park Zoo, which was closed in 1996. The exhibit is recreated faithfully in the short, emphasizing the austere concrete, long shadows and the rather brutalist approach zoos of the 1950s had to interior design. The image of a white bear, alone and bright against the hard angles and harder grays of his exhibit, is a striking one. While it’s unaddressed in the short, the zoo was closed as public opinion turned against it. Though previously considered a landmark attraction for the city, its cramped quarters, artificial environments, and inability to modernize to current ethical standards resulted in the public voting to close it. Tuk died in 1997 at the age of 36, a year after the closure of the zoo. The film names the bear as ‘Kut’ and his age listed as 45. 36 is only one year less than the oldest a polar bear has ever lived in recorded history, so at 45 Kut would have been creakier than a rusty chair being sat on by a fidgety child. Speaking of children and creakiness, Kut’s circumstances are mirrored in the old man’s own life. (An old man is the adult stage of a boy). Direct shots compare the loneliness, abandonment, squalor and cramped conditions of the old man’s apartment to Kut’s pit. In his old age, he has been similarly forgotten.
There are further parallels. Jun, the old man, is a veteran of an unnamed war. (My guess would be Vietnam, as that would about fit with the timeline. Canada did not participate, but 30,000 men volunteered, so it’s possible Jun was among them. Participating in a historically unpopular war would also tie that history to the changing attitudes towards zoos). Both are shown to have lost their parents and experienced violent trauma. There’s tension between them and their environments. Yet they seem to exist at arm’s length from one another, leaving me wishing such ties and ideas could have been emphasized more. It might've helped make it more conclusive, since the ending lacks resolution. I feel like I’ve watched the first few minutes of a longer film. One I’d happily watch, but a short film lives and dies on the impact of its final moments.
Animated with digital cut-outs, the art style of the film oscillates between pleasing and garish. There are many poignant, effective shots - one image I’ll hold on to for some time is Kut in his pit as the shadows of the departing animals pass over him. The simplicity makes it striking. Other shots drown in visual noise. Digital overlays and paints clash against scanned paper textures. Backgrounds, foregrounds and midgrounds buzz with excruciating and equal detail, making it difficult to know what is of importance in the frame, though there are some where the digital and the analogue come together effectively. The puppets are textured to look like their stop-motion forebears, complete with shadows from overlapped paper and swivelling articulation. This is appreciated, and yet the effect is also undermined by occasional short-cuts. For example, in one scene Jun awakes from a nightmare and takes several heaving breaths. If replication of analogue execution was the intent, I would have chosen to create several more ‘chest’ pieces expanding outwards and swapped them in and out, as was done beneath the camera in the past. Instead, the film digitally bulged the original chest piece, giving the character a swelling-bullfrog effect. Oddly, the shot before achieved the gasping by moving the pieces normally and keeping more of an analogue charm. These issues are elsewhere in the film - there’s a slidiness to the animation that makes movement too smooth and constant. I wonder if the choice to make this digitally was made out of convenience, or to contrast the slicker ‘current’ technology of animation against a simulacrum of the old-fashioned. If so, I think having only Kut, Jun and characters in past flashbacks as distinctly ‘old school’ in their animation style (if they were the only paper cut-out characters, for example), contrasted against more modern techniques (2D or 3D animation) would have been a more deliberate and effective way to show that mismatch (the world literally advancing - technologically and otherwise - without them).
Still, I can’t deny that I immediately wanted to know more about what the short was based on. I spent a great deal of time reading up on The Stanley Park Zoo and the animals that lived there, including watching this delightful documentary made about it by the NFB. It was fascinating to hear how important the Zoo was, and how beloved, before public opinion shifted. A whole generation of children and immigrants to the city have no memory of it. The polar bear pit is used for salmon spawning now, a more nature-friendly use for the space. Reading about how seniors are struggling to live in the increasingly gentrified and expensive city of Vancouver has a much less happy ending.
Overall, I think the short introduces some thought-provoking concepts about how society quickly moves on from the old, leaving behind those who are unable to keep up, even if their suffering is what made our present. Perhaps society moves on because it finds the social context and attitudes these people and bears and history represent as uncomfortable, as distasteful relics of a less-informed time. There’s an idea of how ‘inconvenience’ leads us to just avoid thinking of them all together, and therefore allowing them to suffer alone. The film certainly starts interesting discussions, and if there’s a chance to get a longer work out of this it could flesh out those concepts more conclusively I'd leap to see it.
Oh, one other thing. I can’t help but feel that the director missed a chance for a visual pun. Those pictures that the boy took with his family as he grew up? They should have been POLARoid photos. Eh? Eeehhhh?
Listen, puns are one of the few methods I know for ending things. That could just be because they make people leave, though…
