Paddle to the Sea is a 1966 short film (28 minutes) directed by Bill Mason, and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
It is an adaptation of children's book Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling C. Holling. A boy, a member of the "Nipigon people
" of northwestern Ontario, is sickly and so can't travel around very much. So instead he makes a wood carving, a little carving of a First Nations man in a wooden canoe. The boy sets it on a snowy hillside, with the hope that when the snow melts, little "Paddle to the Sea" will in fact be carried to the sea.
And so it does. The snow melts, and the little carving toboggans down the hill into a stream. "Paddle to the Sea" goes through some rapids before hitting Lake Superior, then journeys through the Great Lakes, passing a (staged) forest fire and the city of Detroit, passing over Niagara Falls before hitting the St. Lawrence River and heading for the open ocean.
Tropes:
- And the Adventure Continues: The film ends with the lighthouse keeper flinging Paddle-to-the-Sea into the ocean, as the narrator wonders where it will go next.
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: Several extreme closeups of scenery and nature, like the extreme closeup of a frog that is clinging to the carving to avoid getting eaten by a large fish that is prowling below. (The frog finally hops off Paddle-to-the-Sea and is immediately eaten.)
- Book Ends: The film starts with the lighthouse keeper on the coast picking up Paddle-to-the-Sea. At the end, after repainting it, he flings it back into the ocean.
- Green Aesop: The 1960s were the nadir of the horrible pollution of the Great Lakes. One scene shows a bunch of what looks like waste oil poured from a ship and all over little Paddle-to-the-Sea. Then a quick montage shows gross sludgy pollution in the lake and some nasty brown water pouring into the lake from some sort of industrial drain.
- Hard-Work Montage: A montage shows the boy carving and painting what is a pretty intricate little sculpture of a man in a canoe. He even melts lead and pours it into a groove in the bottom, to keep Paddle-to-the-Sea upright as he floats.
- How We Got Here: The film opens with a lighthouse keeper somewhere on the Gulf of St. Lawrence finding the little carving. After the narrator asks "How did it get here?", the rest of the film answers that question.
- Kuleshov Effect: All the close-ups of the little wooden carving really do make it seem like a man in a canoe is gliding down the St. Lawrence watershed.
- Lighthouse Point: The film opens with a lonely lighthouse keeper, on the coast, seeing Paddle-to-the-Sea bobbing in the surf. He picks it up and, at the end of the film, retouches the faded paint before throwing the little carving back in the water.
- Narrator: There is no dialogue in the film, but instead a narrative track wherein the narrator describes Paddle-to-the-Sea's adventures.
- Road Trip Plot: A road trip by water, as the camera goes from a hilltop in northwest Ontario through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence to the ocean, showing natural beauty, the lights of Detroit, Niagara Falls, and industrial pollution.
- Scenery Porn: A lot of stunning photography of the St. Lawrence watershed.
- Title Drop: The narrator asks "How did it get here, this little creature called Paddle-to-the-Sea?" The wooden carving is called that throughout the film.
