MOVIES Chinatown to Stanley Park Zoo

Adrian Mack

Eagle-eyed viewers might catch the link between Julia Kwan’s beautiful new 12-minute short “The Zoo” and her 2014 doc on Chinatown gentrification, Everything Will Be. The May Wah Hotel on East Pender appears in both, although it is rendered as a brightly coloured background in the filmmaker’s latest, getting its premiere at this year’s SPARK Animation film festival.

In her first foray away from liveaction cinema, Kwan weaves the tale of a Chinese resident in Vancouver with that of Tuk, the last occupant of the bear enclosure at the Stanley Park Zoo until it was finally shut down in 1997. We watch one grow from boy to old man, the other from wild cub to bored and lonely captive. It’s an elegant, wordless tale of displacement and solitude that also presents a fablelike take on the history of Vancouver itself.

“It connects back to Everything Will Be, for sure,” Kwan tells the Georgia Straight. “Spending time in the May Wah Hotel, I saw a lot of seniors living in, well, not the most ideal conditions. And it made me think about how they were, in a sense, being left behind because maybe friends or family have passed. All those themes dovetailed and percolated into ‘The Zoo’.”

Kwan notes that the character of the old man is based partly on her own 88-year-old father. Designing Tuk, meanwhile, was just one of the tests she faced on an especially steep learning curve. “I give full credit to the character designers, because they had to endure me,” Kwan says in tribute to collaborators Jesse Cote, Bonni Reid, and the team at Jesters Animation.