Wapos Bay has been a favorite of the Yorkton Film Festival since the series began, since the pilot episode - There’s No I in Hockey, which is also what we’re looking at today - took home the award for Best Children’s Programming in 2006. The series went on to win the category in 2009 and 2010. Since it has won awards more than once from the festival, it’s a good reason to see what it was that made the series connect with the festival juries.
As a kid’s show, the broad strokes are pretty easy to guess, especially in this first episode. Here we have a set of plotlines that are nothing if not familiar to anyone who has sat down to watch a bit of kids TV. We learn the value of teamwork, with T-Bear (Taylor Cook) being a prima-donna with his hockey team and learning why he needs to rely on his teammates in a team sport. This gives the episode its title, and while it’s a typical plotline for a kids show, it’s handled well and the big moment at the end to show the lesson has been learned is effective. We learn the value of being considerate, as Raven (Raven Brass) is supposed to cook bannock with her Kohkum but instead mostly blows it off to hang out with her friends. Finally Talon (Eric Jackson) meets a girl he likes, a player for the opposing hockey team, though this storyline mostly just peters out.
None of these stories are new ground for a kid’s series, but then the broad strokes aren’t really the strength of the pilot of Wapos Bay. This is a show of details, and the most important detail is the location. Set on a reservation in northern Saskatchewan, it uses a winter festival to cement a sense of place. The events of the festival - hockey tournaments, bannock making competitions, dogsled races - are typical of the setting, and the entire cast is aboriginal. They’re also all dolls, being a stop-motion animated show, a style that means the animators have to concentrate heavily on the details. The style fits the creation, because it’s the details that make the show and set it apart from much of the other
The details make it, whether it’s the perfect re-creation of a small town arena or even an extremely subtle joke. Kohkum’s husband reacting to Raven saying “I’ve never seen her this mad” by merely saying “I have” in a perfect, tiny moment that defines a long-running marriage. A ref at a hockey game actually forgets his glasses, but the punchline is delivered quietly by his wife.
It can go a bit far with its Canadiana, by which I mean the character of “Don Red Cherry,” which is a bit of an obvious pick when you’re putting hockey commentators in your Canadian children’s show, but in spite of getting a groan from me it’s going to play fairly well to much of the audience.
The details give the show character. It’s not doing anything new with the story of its first episode, I’ve seen other kids shows tackle the exact same topics. But the details give it a firm sense of place, they give it a clear voice, and they give the northern kids watching a show that’s a lot like their home, with kids that look like they would if they were wooden dolls. You could get this story somewhere else, but you can’t get it in the same way, and the achievement of the show is how it takes a universal kid’s show template and uses the details and the setting to make it something very distinctive.
.JPG;w=120;h=80;mode=crop)
