Paddle to the Sea: the movie

  This week I found two kid movies to watch.   I don't know why they have this distinction, because I loved them both and I haven't lately been mistaken for a child.

 These children's films, however, are not ones found in a rental store , the kind with Hollywood production values and modern, over-indulged child actors. Nor are they animations of fish with Brooklyn accents or  violent rodents with french ones.  No, these two films are unusual and in a genre " a part".

   The first film I will introduce here was based on a favorite childhood book:   Holling C. Holling's  Paddle to the Sea.  

 Done by Janus Films in 1968, Bill Mason as director; it is on a par with their other offerings: The Red Balloon and White Mane which we all know as excellent, award winning films.

 The story of Paddle to the Sea is that of an Indian boy who carefully makes a small carving of a canoe with a single rider and places it in the snows of Upper Lake Superior, hoping that it will find it's way through all the great lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. He carves on the bottom, :"If you find me, please put me back in the sea.  I am Paddle to the Sea."

 The film, follows the boat and rider as it goes through adventures, trials and seemingly insurmountable barriers.  Whether he will make it or not is the issue as we follow on through the changing seasons depicted with a eye for its wonder and beauty. 

 It is a film that moved me, as I saw the metaphor unfold, a meditative film that had me reflecting on our own journey and our own attachment to the natural world.  There is no dialogue, but a simple narration which gives it a reverent, pure quality. 

                                                          

Those who know the book well,  who had it read to you as a child as my family did,  may be disappointed that the story is simplified.

We do not find out who wrote on the bottom of the boat as they found it and that the boy later in life hears from these people. Some of the adventures are omitted. The idea that he is a native American is also left out and that his illness prevents the boy from paddling a canoe himself.

 But for me this movie is lovely and refreshing and I forgive these omissions.  It stands on it's own as a piece of art.  As does the book.  If you didn't get a chance to read it or see it as a kid, do it as a bigger one.

Amazingly, you can find a compilation version of the movie in three parts on You Tube.