REANIMATED ILLUSTRATOR
Heart attack stirs Cohen
It took a near-death experience to bring Sheldon Cohen’s career back to life. Cohen is grateful, as we should all be. Cohen had been content in semiretirement. The Montreal animator/director was in the midst of writing his memoirs, a good portion of which would focus on The Sweater (1980), his iconic adaptation of Roch Carrier’s short story.
But out of the blue, Cohen suffered a heart attack. He later underwent a quintuple bypass. But rather than succumb to the blues, Cohen decided to go back to the drawing board and animate his near-fatal experience.
The result is — dare we say? — the heartwarming film short My Heart Attack, which makes its Montreal première Saturday at Les Sommets du cinéma animation at the Cinémathèque Québécoise. (This animated filmfest starts Wednesday and wraps Sunday.)
Like much of his animated work, My Heart Attack comes alive with bold, primary colours and folksy character sketches. And, of course, with much whimsy.
As an added bonus, the film ends with an enchanting rendering of the Anna McGarrigle composition, Heartbeats Accelerating, sung by her kids Sylvan and Lily Lanken. (Turns out Rufus and Martha Wainwright aren’t the only golden-voiced offspring of the extended McGarrigle clan.)
While Cohen, who narrates the English version, is most frank in re-living his cardiac crisis, he also takes a decidedly witty approach. He wonders how an even-keeled “Jewish boy with Buddhist inclinations,” a vegetarian, a meditator and a non-smoker with no trace of heart disease in his family, could be so stricken.
Wacky yet true, Cohen was napping one blissful afternoon when a phone call from his wife Donna shattered his reverie. She blurted something about their beloved pooch Gracie at a nearby park. Cohen made a mad dash over to the park, to observe his
bride administering mouth-tomouth resuscitation to another dog — a pal of Gracie’s. Turns out this hound had suffered a heart attack.
In the midst of hauling the dog to a vet, Cohen couldn’t stop panting. To his horror, he was in the midst of having a heart attack himself, and after unloading the dog at the vet, he made his way to the hospital. In a nick of time, at that.
The film then goes on to deal with his recuperation and a newfound appreciation of life. After being told by his cardiologist that his heart attack was simply the result of bad luck, he told her that he disagreed: “I’ve never felt so lucky in my life.” This coming from a fellow whose priorities used to be success, approval and — No. 1 — a good parking spot.
Cohen bears a resemblance to Larry David. He even talks like the Seinfeld/Curb Your Enthusiasm creator. And, while he’s also funny, he’s nowhere near as cynical or as hyper as the curmudgeonly David — whose low boiling-point shtick would seem far more likely to induce cardiac arrest.
“I never in a million years imagined I’d be here talking about an animated film — I thought I had called it a career,” says the soft-spoken Cohen, 66, while petting the ever-present Gracie, in his Snowdon home. “The last thing on my mind was doing another film. But then again the last thing on my mind was actually also having a heart attack.
“With all the humour there is in the film, there is also a serious side, and the challenge was to create a mix of the two. I sort of crossed a line with the heart attack and life isn’t the same after it. I definitely feel much a greater awareness of every day.”
When he first started recounting this story to friends, they all told him that it felt like it would make an animated film. He wasn’t so sure.
“The direction I had been going in was to become an art therapist. I had actually applied for a master’s degree but I got refused — which really threw me,” says Cohen, who has created eight animated shorts with the NFB and also illustrated the picturebook version of The Sweater as well as the sequel to the original Carrier story — the latter for which he won the 1991 Governor General’s Literary Award for illustration.
With that therapist option out of the way, Cohen decided to approach his longtime NFB producer Marcy Page about doing an animated take on his heart attack. “It was just a knee-jerk reaction and I figured she’d probably say no. But the next thing I knew I had a contract to do the film.”
His buddy Carrier was so taken after seeing Cohen’s latest that he made this declaration: “I believe this film will do for the heart what The Sweater did for the puck.”
“What’s so strange is that I should have been the last person to have a heart attack and also the last person to do The Sweater,” Cohen says. “I’m an anglo Jew who had spent little time in a church or in little Quebec villages, who skated on his ankles and wasn’t really a hockey fan. I just seem to be drawn to situations where it’s new territory for me.”
And sometimes it takes someone without a vested view in a subject to bring it to another level. The Sweater — the bittersweet tale of a young Habs fan (Carrier) who was erroneously sent a Maple Leafs sweater and thus became a social outcast in his village — is one of the most popular animated shorts of all time in Canada.
“I was in my late 20s when I started that film. I was lucky because I had just started as a student at an NFB summer program. I had actually been studying at McGill to be a dentist. And like so many other things in my life, being a dentist now is the last thing I can ever imagine having done with my life.
“I had always been inclined to do art, and maybe it’s something I picked up from my parents, but somehow I got it into my head that you don’t do art as a living. Then I went to see Pinocchio on the big screen with my future wife Donna, who remarked how amazing it was to see characters from paper come alive. Something then clicked inside me and I said: ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to use drawings to create life.’ ”
Of note, Cohen and wife-to-be Donna, shortly after their Pinocchio date, would break up for 10 years. Then she saw The Sweater, and the two got back together again.
And yet another magical happy ending ensued.