Calgary-based animator ready to walk red carpet as his MONSTR premieres on HBO Max

After his wife died of a brain aneurysm, Tank Standing Buffalo was lost.

He decided to start walking until he couldn't anymore.

Leaving Calgary, he went west and eventually came across a carving shed. Although that's where his walk ended, it's really where his journey toward healing began.

"They gave me an apprenticeship. I stayed with them for those two and a half years … working through my grief through this physical work that my mentors were putting me through. And then just facing myself really," he said in an interview on The Homestretch.

Standing Buffalo's story is the inspiration for his third short feature cartoon, MONSTR. 

It's one of eight short films being shown at a premiere Wednesday in Los Angeles as part of a program run by Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO Max. 

Artists from historically underrepresented communities were invited to present stories only they could tell. The successful applicants received a production budget, resources and a mentor over the course of a year.

Standing Buffalo's film beat out more than 1,000 applicants from across the U.S. and Canada. 

"It's pretty cool to get flown out to Hollywood just because I draw," he said. 

"I think imposter syndrome is playing in my mind right now.… But it's been really cool, and I just can't believe that it's happening to somebody like me."

The cartoon is Standing Buffalo's third auto-biographical production, after RKLSS (2020), which explores his time as a young offender, and SAVJ (2021), about the survival and separation of Standing Buffalo and his siblings. 

Xstine Cook, the film's co-writer and producer, has been involved in all three of Standing Buffalo's projects.

"Tank was ready to tell the third story in his kind of triptych of autobiographical horror fantasies," she said. 

"He uses his art to work through all of the challenges that he's gone through, and he's able to kind of transform them into these really truthful but also fantastical stories."

MONSTR

Standing Buffalo has always loved the horror and fantasy genre, so his cartoon focuses on his walk through the woods as he deals with his own demons along the way, Cook said.

"There's something about it, that kind of visceral-ness, that it kind of works," she said. "Then animation … anything your imagination can imagine, you can draw it."

It also explores his apprenticeship with carver Phil Ashbee. He learned to create masks and totem poles while also completing demanding physical work, like hauling wood and sharpening knives.

Standing Buffalo says the story explores how the work of healing is never truly done.

"There was a lot of spiders in [Ashbee's] carving shed and he'd always point out that the spider's web gets destroyed. The very next day, there's a brand new web there. That you just keep working," he said.

"These cartoons, it's really a way for me to slow things down and think about what happened."

The work is also strengthened by an "epic" and "spooky" soundtrack, created by Calgary artists Cara Adu-Darko and Brandon Smith, and a large crew who helped to expedite the process of creating the cartoon, Cook said.

LISTEN | Tank Standing Buffalo describes what it's like to be in L.A. for the premiere:

Cook said the final product, and being able to bring it to large audiences in L.A., is incredible.

"We're just super excited," she said.

Standing Buffalo is working toward his first feature film.

MONSTR will stream on HBO Max starting March 23.