The National Film Board’s Snow Cat, an animated short directed by Sheldon Cohen, is based on the children’s book by Dayal Kaur Khalsa, and is produced by Cohen, Kenneth Hirsch and Marcy Page.

The story: Elsie lives alone in a secluded house and longs for a pet to keep her company. One day she gets her wish – the North Wind sends her a snow cat, but with it comes a warning: the cat must never go inside Elsie’s warm house.

‘The inevitable happens, the cat melts and forms into a lake. Elsie must come to terms with these transformations in nature,’ says Page, a producer with the nfb. Eventually, Elsie finds a new friend, a snow goose, to help her recover from the loss of the cat.

The film is also an allegory dealing with the eventual acceptance of death. The book was written while Khalsa was coming to terms with her own terminal illness.

Snow Cat’s animation consists of traditional cel techniques combined with an experimental finger style pioneered by Jeami. Cohen and Les Drew’s animation is inked and painted on acetate cels, then placed over backgrounds created by Elaine Gasco, based on the illustrations in Khalsa’s book.

The $600,000 short received support from the Shaw Children’s Programming Initiative and was produced in association with Channel 4 in the u.k.

‘Because the nfb has such a solid international reputation, it is ironically sometimes easier for us to find international partners for our animation than national partners,’ says Page.

The 23-minute special was broadcast on Teletoon during the 1998 holiday season. Other Canadian presales for Snow Cat include Knowledge Network and cfc Montreal.

Snow Cat recently received the award for best animation film at the Yorkton Short Film & Video Festival.

Cohen’s other films with the nfb include Pies (1983), The Sweater (1980), Poets on Film No. 2/Death by Streetcar (1977) and Bossa Bop (1974). He’s currently teaching at Harvard.

Page was also nominated for a Rockie in 1997 as one of the producers of Short, Animated Canadian, a six-part series featuring new nfb animation with unconventional biographical wraparounds. It didn’t win at Banff, but the series was recognized with an award from the Atlantic Film Festival.

While traditionally the nfb’s work is not produced for television, Page says being nominated for a Rockie is very encouraging.

‘We want our work to be seen by a larger public,’ she says. ‘The move to creating something for television is not about commercial pressure, but the desire for more visibility.’

Page and Cohen are hoping to produce a second project based on another book by Khalsa, I Want a Dog.