Cry the beloved trees

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This article was published 27/07/2024 (436 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On a sweltering Monday afternoon in July, Takashi Iwasaki and Jeff McKay met in the food court of Winnipeg’s outlet mall — an air-conditioned town unto itself.

Years ago, trees stood where there is now a crepe stand and furry creatures rested where men now gloomscroll while waiting for their significant others to call it quits at Kate Spade.

“When push came to shove, people wanted an outlet,” says McKay, a wizened filmmaker with a rebellious streak who’s won a Peabody Award. “They didn’t want a forest. They didn’t want the woods. This was all forest. Nobody sees the value in the forest.”

As McKay’s speech became more animated, Iwasaki, an artist whose sense of whimsy floats on an undercurrent of pessimism, nods along, his topknot bobbing to the beat of the mall’s sanitized pop music soundtrack.

The two friends chose this location to speak with a reporter about their short film, Shitty Little, a black-and-white cri de coeur about the sacrifices humankind has made by choosing to prioritise economy ahead of ecology.

“This is a shitty little tree,” McKay says to open his narration of the seven-minute short, sounding so disinterested in the sapling’s future that what happens next — removal, destruction and transformation into goods — is a foregone conclusion. Told through McKay’s sardonic poem and vivid craft-paper cutouts devised by Iwasaki, Shitty Little is a prairified Lorax, an environmental parable the filmmakers needed to make.

McKay, who cut his teeth from 1985 to 2003 with the National Film Board of Canada, has always explored excess and outliers in his filmmaking career. The Peabody-winning, Genie-nominated Fat Chance, released in 1994, was a heartfelt and evocative portrait of one man’s struggle with obesity. He’s made films about the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (40 Years of One Night Stands), cultural offshoots (Winnipagans) and sewage leaks (2003’s Crapshoot).

A few years ago, while presenting a film called Call of the Forest in Toronto, McKay was walking the film’s subject, botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, to the train station when he stopped in his tracks.

“There were these two sad-looking trees,” he recalls, with garbage encircling the base. “The city had nailed an electrical outlet to them. It was just obvious there was no respect there whatsoever.”

So McKay wrote a poem about those trees, later recognizing their potential as a central symbol for a film. But McKay knew the problem with nature documentaries: so many had been made, so many had been ignored, so many had made the exact same arguments in exactly the same ways. Then he called Iwasaki, a Hokkaido-born Winnipegger with a penchant for making anything with his hands that he can see in his head.

Last year, the two men holed up in the basement studio of St. Boniface’s Forum Art Centre to adapt McKay’s song of urban malaise into a live-animation film that reaches surprising, elegiac depths.

Iwasaki, who has known McKay since 2008, imprinted his own touch. A ceramicist, collagist, painter and a newly minted MFA recipient from the University of Manitoba, Iwasaki’s work is generally “happy looking,” he says, but he maintains that it’s always aware of the “double-sidedness of life.”

Shitty Little was no different. Using a pen knife, craft paper and his children’s art supplies, Iwasaki cut out flat, black figures — wolves, bears, snakes, greedy humans and those shitty little trees — to establish an ominous aura.

In the film, McKay mockingly refers to these creatures as shitty to remind the audience that they’re the opposite. In the food court, he stops just short of calling Iwasaki a magician.

“I call Takashi and say, I need an airplane with a banner, and by the time I finish the sentence, he’s already done,” he laughs.

The film, which screened at the Gimli International Film Festival Thursday and will run again today, has also been shown at festivals in Montreal, Montana, Glasgow and Dawson City.

At Thursday’s screening in Gimli, the audience was particularly moved by a cameo from Iwasaki’s hand, which descends from the top of the frame like a claw machine, outfitted with long, sharp fingernail extensions to enable the uprooting of a tree.

The filmmakers considered having the final removal being performed by a machine — the kind that can cut down, debark and shred a cedar in the blink of an eye — but decided a more human touch was more effective.

Iwasaki’s hand — which to McKay had the bite of Nosferatu — was the ideal choice.

“(The human hand) is the perfect death machine for trees,” he said.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com