Tag Archives: Karen’s Pick

The Bear Who Wasn’t There

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Oren LavieSo I was actually hoping to find music by Oren Lavie, but stumbled upon The Bear Who Wasn’t There instead, which I found kind of poetic: the Bear certainly wasn’t there in my mind as an option when I went on my virtual walk through the Fabulous Forest that is our Clean new Catalogue that has not relied on Cards for a very long time*.

Growing from an Itch (that I suppose materialized out of… Nowhere? Or There?), this Bear – a very happy, nice and handsome bear, if the note in the pocket that the Bear himself only just discovers he has is anything to go by – is on a mission to find himself. Is he a happy bear? a nice bear? a handsome bear? At least we know from the start that he is a Bear with a Pocket (and a Mission).

Along the way, we meet the curious and – as Alice might say – curiouser inhabitants of the Fabulous Forest (all delightfully alliterated with matching personalities to boot!): the Lazy Lizard lazes about on top of the Convenient Cow, couched in the grass; the Penultimate Penguin polices what the Bear is and is not allowed to think (because the Penguin himself has already taken Everything, not leaving even Nothing for the Bear); and the Turtle Taxi who taxes himself out going to and fro, thinking someone has called for a Taxi (and so the Bear, who we discover is nice, decides to call the Turtle Taxi in order to go somewhere that is apparently quite a popular destination: Forward).

Curiously, the Bear who wasn’t There is more There throughout the entire book than the Bird atop his head, only visible as an outline: is the Bird, who is never quite addressed or given a name, a figment of the Bear’s imagination, or is the Bird every bit as There as the Bear, who wasn’t, before he was?** The illustrations by Wolf Erlbruch are an absolute joy: the clumsy – shall I say, burly? – figure of the Bear chimes perfectly with the narration and his character, and the lush Forest is every bit as Fabulous as advertised. This meander through the Wonderful Woods that are the Fabulous Forest with the Bear who wasn’t There (although he is, now!) is a charming adventure in the Slippery beast that is Semantics, which I now heartily and wholeheartedly recommend to adults and children alike!

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The Red Turtle (2016)

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by Michael Dudok de WitIf you have yet to be acquainted with Studio Ghibli productions, please take a look through our collection now. (You’ll find that The Red Turtle is quite different from the rest of Studio Ghibli’s productions though, as the story and screenplay were by Michael Dudok de Wit, and the style makes me think Studio Ghibli played a slightly more minor role in this production than in their other animations. That being said, the moment I saw the trailer for The Red Turtle, I immediately recognized those waves – Ghibli had its hand in there somewhere, even if it was so very different from what I had come to expect in terms of style. )

While this film will likely leave you with more questions than you entered with, as well as make you wonder if you’re overanalyzing the plot, and possible symbols, or if you should simply take it as it is, it’s well worth watching this slow and quiet epic, and it ages quite well as you return to it. There are no words throughout, though there is some frustrated screaming into the ocean – and I know that Shaun the Sheep was much praised for the same thing (being wordless, that is, not for its screaming into the ocean), but this is a different use of wordless animation that will probably appeal more to adult audiences – so you end up relying a lot on the beautiful soundtrack, though even in the moments with neither music nor words, the sound of the trees rustling, hurried breathing, a panicked noise, are more than enough to relay the emotions within each scene.

The Red Turtle hasn’t been released on DVD/Blu-ray yet, but it’s still playing (at the time of writing this post) at the TIFF, so go see it if you get the chance!

Here are some other films that you might like if you’re either thinking of seeing this or enjoyed it:

  1. My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
  2. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
  3. From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)
  4. Ernest and Celestine (2014)

I Am Not a Number

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Residential SchoolsI Am Not a Number, by Jenny Kay Dupuis and Kathy Kacer, illustrated by Gillian Newland, tells the story of Irene Couchie, Dupuis’ grandmother, and her experience of the residential schooling system, where, along with many other First Nations children, she was stripped of her identity both as a person – the children went by numbers, not names; she was assigned 759 – and as a member of her community, punished for speaking her language – the Devil’s tongue, the nuns called it. As Irene is getting her hair cut, she says that she is crying not only because her hair is getting cut, but because in her community, hair is cut as a signifier of loss; the nun is not only cutting Irene’s hair: she is attempting to kill Irene and her culture*.

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