In Focus - A friend in the cold outdoors

This is the Christmas issue of Yorkton This Week, so it’s only natural to try to find something that fits as a Christmas film. Snow Cat, directed by Sheldon Cohen, is about Christmas in the same way that Frosty the Snowman is, a story of a temporary winter friend rather than a tale about the holiday – it fits the season most of all.  Based on a short story by Dayal Kaur Khalsa, it’s something to watch as the cold north wind blows outside on a holiday evening.

Within a frame narrative about a grandmother and her pillow fort-dwelling granddaughter wiling away the hours on a cold winter’s day, we hear the story of Elsie, a woman living alone in the far north, who yearns for some companionship which is also cheap to feed. The north wind, a tempestuous character, decides to send her a snow cat, a creature made out of snow and thus prone to melting. They go on adventures, but the moment she is warned to never bring him inside you can tell where the story is going.

It takes a turn after that twist, because it has  to – this is a very traditional story, happiness with strings attached, but because of this the story has to have more to it than the expected outline. It becomes a story about letting go, Elsie’s companions – a baby goose joins later – tend to leave. Maybe we can infer something about the grandmother in the tale from this, maybe she’s preparing the young girl for the inevitable. While the stated moral of the story – some pets are best left outside – is certainly something parents with rambunctious white dogs might embrace, the story has a little more depth than that.

It also happens to be a winter film that doesn’t look like a traditional winter film. Cohen knows how to make a film that looks like winter, he directed the animated version of The Sweater, that bit of Canadiana about the tragedy of getting a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey sweater. Here, instead of embracing whites and light blues, he goes dark. Built off of a finger painting animation developed by Jeãmi, the film is largely glowing lines over black backgrounds.

It’s a way to look like winter while going in an unexpected direction. It’s dark, yet vibrant in colour, like a house decked out in Christmas lights on the shortest day of the year. I haven’t always been a fan of Cohen’s work, his characters have a tendency towards weird proportions and movement, but it works with the animation style. Snow Cat can look minimalist and abstract, but that just adds to the fairy tale qualities of the film.

That is why I chose to highlight it this week. It’s not about Christmas itself, neither Jesus nor Santa make an appearance. Instead, it looks like Christmas, bright lights in the blackness of a too-long night. It feels like Christmas, the meeting of friends and family you might not see every day, and the importance of both treasuring your time together and accepting your time apart. And it reminds me of my brother’s own white pet, who needs to be kept outside not because he’ll melt, but because he will break everything inside.