--- title: Watch: A Pet Turtle's Pursuit of Happiness in “Snowy” description: Watch this short documentary from Kaitlyn Schwalje and Alex Wolf Lewis, an investigation into animal happiness and an intervention to improve one turtle’s life. canonical: https://time.com/6113042/snowy-documentary-turtle-happiness/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-11-04T11:00:38.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:45:04.777Z article:section: Science og:title: Watch: A Pet Turtle's Pursuit of Happiness og:description: A short documentary into animal happiness and an intervention to improve one turtle’s life. og:url: https://time.com/6113042/snowy-documentary-turtle-happiness/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt58b71680f6bbb4b2/698a1e6609208f15b34186ae/Snowy_001.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: Snowy, a Short Film og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Watch: A Pet Turtle's Pursuit of Happiness twitter:description: A short documentary into animal happiness and an intervention to improve one turtle’s life. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt58b71680f6bbb4b2/698a1e6609208f15b34186ae/Snowy_001.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- # Watch: A Pet Turtle's Pursuit of Happiness in 'Snowy' > Sponsored content. 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Future Proof is TIME's weekly climate and energy newsletter, written by senior correspondent Justin Worland. It connects the energy transition to the decisions reshaping business, technology, policy and markets. #### Where can I follow the energy transition as a business story? Future Proof covers climate and energy as an economic and business story rather than only an environmental one. It publishes every Friday and is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who writes Future Proof? Justin Worland, a senior correspondent at TIME and an award-winning climate journalist, writes Future Proof. #### Is Future Proof free? Yes. Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: Snowy, by Alexander Lewis and Kaitlyn Schwalje [Watch (HLS stream): Snowy, by Alexander Lewis and Kaitlyn Schwalje](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/C2fEnUCL.m3u8) (12:27)  _Published 2021-11-04. Filmmakers Kaitlyn Schwalje and Alex Wolf Lewis decided to make a film about Snowy the pet turtle after spending Thanksgiving with him one year. Their short documentary is both an investigation into animal happiness and an intervention to improve one turtle’s life._ Nov 4, 2021 11:00 AM UTC by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## TIME Staff Nov 4, 2021 11:00 AM UTC _Filmmakers Kaitlyn Schwalje and Alex Wolf Lewis decided to make a movie_ _about Snowy the pet turtle after spending Thanksgiving with him one year. Their short documentary is both an investigation into animal happiness and an intervention to improve one turtle’s life._ **_Snowy_** **is a comedy. But there also seems to be a deeper message?** **Alex:** It’s easy to take life for granted. It’s even easier to fall into habits and lose sight of the fact that we’re surrounded by incredible people, each a human-shaped time capsule full of story and experience. We’d hoped that Snowy, an insignificant little thing on the order of life forms, could be an accessible way to realize that there’s always room to better understand life experiences outside our own, whether it’s your grandmother, neighbor, or a pet turtle. **Kaitlyn:** There’s also something to takeaway from Uncle Larry’s character that we haven’t fully teased out ourselves. Without having all the information, Larry thought he was doing right by Snowy. On the one hand, he fed Snowy well-balanced meals and diligently cleaned his tank. But Snowy was living out his days in a cold dark basement without much warmth or sunlight. For a cold blooded animal, this was far from an ideal habitat. Maybe the moral is that it’s easy to convince ourselves we’re doing right by someone or something, but when more information presents itself we realize what we’re offering is woefully inadequate. **Alex:** When working together or coming up with ideas, Kaitlyn and I very much subscribe to the philosophy of YES…AND. We riff and sometimes it gets weird. We even floated the idea of opening the film with Larry reading from a cue card in broken French, “I am the owner of a small pet turtle. I am being forced to read this against my will…” While all ideas are worth trying, not all ideas are good. Our families share a dry and morbid sense of humor which feels like home to us. Uncle Larry and everyone on that side of the family is hilarious. Going to Thanksgiving with them is like watching a Comedy Central roast. Last year, Uncle Larry passed out from laughing too hard. **Kaitlyn:** For Snowy, this story is a tragedy, maybe even a horror film. For the audience and for us, it’s a comedy. There’s humor in this contrast. **How did the pandemic factor into the making of** **_Snowy_** **?** **Kaitlyn:** We wrapped production just before lockdown. Our editors Katharina Stroh and Alexander Heringer (originally from Germany) were back home for a visit and got stuck behind the travel ban. As a result, we ended up doing all of post-production remotely. There were too many zoom calls to count and lots of stretching video conferencing technology to its limits. Our coloring sessions happened in the middle of winter, at the height of the first outbreak when we were still bleaching our groceries in the bathtub. Filipp Kotsishevskiy, our colorist, set up a monitor on his porch and blacked out the windows with trash bags while we communicated over speaker phone. **Alex:** We didn’t intend to make a movie about being in lockdown, but the film helped us make it through that first scary year of the pandemic by keeping us distracted. Snowy the turtle was a source of strength, a kindred spirit. If he could make it through being stuck in a tank for 25 years, we figured we could make it through lockdown. **Why do turtles have such a cult-like following? Who are your favorite pop culture turtles?** **Alex:** What’s the deal with turtles? The legion of turtle fans out there is still a mystery to us. Maybe it’s their calm disposition that’s refreshing to be around? They really are the anti-dog of house pets. We dug deep into the memory banks to answer this one. In a very particular order: Filburt (_Rocko’s Modern Life_), Grand Master Oogway (_Kung Fu Panda_), Bowser, Squirtle, Leonardo (_TMNT_), and Franklin. Surely, there’s a _Jeopardy!_ question hidden in this fictional turtle question… **What’s the most surprising bit of science you learned making this film?** **Kaitlyn:** We were shocked to learn just how aware turtles are of their environment. They were a misunderstood species for decades because scientists originally tested them in cold conditions. Turtles don’t do much of anything when they’re cold and the conclusion from these experiments was that turtles are sluggish and mostly unresponsive. Dr. Anna Wilkinson, our turtle expert, corrected these misconceptions. She told us that Snowy is able to recognize Uncle Larry’s face and his voice. As you can imagine, Larry was thrilled to hear this. Turtles can even store memory for at least 18 months and possibly much longer. **Alex:** Dr. Wilkinson also recounted an amazing story of a female bearded dragon found in a box in the woods. She was missing a big chunk of her tail. For the first couple years of the study, every time a male student with a Northern English accent would talk around the animal, she would get really upset, suggesting the ability to connect a voice to a person and a negative experience. **Do you have pets currently? Any from your childhood that you’d like to tell us about?** **Kaitlyn:** I was definitely working through some bad house pet karma making _Snowy_. As a kid, I had a terrible track record of keeping small animals alive. There was Budweiser the bullfrog that suffocated in a plastic bag before I could get him home from the pet store. Unfed sea monkeys, fish killed by a malfunctioning tank filter and a bunch of newts that escaped and I suspect were eaten by my dog. If you weren’t a dog or a human, my childhood home was a house of horrors. They were really defying the odds if they lived to see a birthday. So this story about Snowy was my opportunity for redemption. **Alex:** We don’t have any pets currently, but we had a memorable one not so long ago. Three years ago, our roommate was finishing his PhD in neuroscience on topics of memory. When a batch of rats arrived at his lab, he found one rat was particularly uncooperative. Less motivated by reward and resistant to training, this rat would be euthanized and experiments would continue with one less participant. Instead of killing the rat, our roommate forged his death certificate and smuggled him home in a motorcycle helmet. We had three years with the rat we named Noam Chomp-sky or Fifi depending on who you ask. We built him country houses out of cardboard, fed him Fruit Loops and gave him free range of the house. He was litter-trained but we do still have holes in our clothes from him sneaking into the laundry basket. **Can you now tell a tortoise from a turtle?** **Kaitlyn:** The answer to this depends on what side of the Atlantic you’re on. Americans often say turtle to mean tortoise while Brits say tortoise to include turtles and tortoises. I’m realizing as I type that we haven’t clarified anything. To play it safe, say turtle. All turtles are tortoises but not all tortoises are turtles. _Snowy made its world premiere at Sundance in 2021\. The film is a Critics’ Choice Award Nominee for Best Short Documentary and included among the 2021 Doc NYC Short List Shorts_ _\-Justine Simons_ --- ### More Documentaries from TIME --- ## Transcript Okay, I'm really. But I think it's like you ready to get started. He's not really happy with where he is. He kind of feels like he lives in inferior housing, and it is kind of a prison. It does make him really feel inadequate and sad. Snow is our family pet turtle. He lives in the corner of our basement and no friends. So my dad thought of you guys need to get him a little buddy. He doesn't really say much to move around at all. Sometimes. I think he's dead and I got to tap him on the back and then he wakes up and he's alive. Did you ever think about taking the college? No, thought, never crossed. My mind. Says, it all is good. And I saw that we were going to clean the tank, buddy. All right, going to hang out there for a little bit. Definitely needs to be changed. I remember putting the tank in the passenger seat of Larry's car. Can say it on you? This is now your job. It'd be really heartbroken. It snowed. So that's why he makes sure to keep it alive. Alright snowing. Here. It goes. I'm not even. Appreciate is clean, but there you go. So why are you making this movie? Like what was your renovation? You want to help knowing that really your motivation? We go out and see if we can dig up a worm worm time. Baby worms that worms for snowing. I usually find them when I run this in the winter time. It's a little bit more difficult. It warms are deeper, but during the summer. I like to carry them. I'll put them in my hand. I'll bring a bag and I'll bring him a bunch of worms. Definitely loves his worms where to find worms. My wife actually bought him from the pet store, not knowing that, he'd be living for 24 more years. So, I'm not sure of his exact age, but it's at least 24. Play. This is a long hold time. You have a question for you, carry, earthworms and nightcrawlers. That'll be a real Feast. Which ones are the nightcrawlers. And the green ones or 12 today. Come back 12, right? We got it. My snowy. Memories are the happy. Look on his face. Every time I throw him a big earthworm. Oh my God. This is going to be amazing. You can be in the shell and not moving around and then you drop a big earthworm and he is just an attack mode. He looks totally excited. This is his hunting moment. Caillou goes, he missed it. It has to get it done. Snowing you can do with a for this thing disappears. How much a year can I make it for you? Baby Hazel anxious cuz he's being filmed and he's all self-conscious. Come on. I get home. Play retarded a hug from your older. He's like really having a hard time. Way to go snowy. This is like a Michelin 3-star restaurants for him. Oh, no, no snowing. Come on. Missy. Just barked it up. LOL. I'm so happy to be with you. He's pretty happy,. He likes the quiet life. There is a little bit of Disconnect because look at this poor freaking turtle and you're saying all these Turtles happy, you can be fine, but you can always be better. I'm not sure if he's ever had a well Turtle check. I think he's pretty well cuz he wasn't well, he probably would have done it a long time ago. Let's get his weights 147 g and then you haven't noticed anything different with his show. No, sign of any cracks. Everything looks great. They check a little muscles on our little back legs. That one looks good, and we'll look at the underside. Check your shell down here. Give me a present. So wait, you bring the turtle in? Uncut. Are turtles. So, whatever happened rectal prolapse, where their intestines were coming, I think she was so excited that you are in a bad way, exciting. She was so stressed out that she or he is at her intestines came out. Should we go into the tooth? Biggest fly to light, blue. Hey Mom, we're coming in the cold-blooded cognition lab, where I explore all aspects of cognition and reptiles how animals to save the world? How they learn, how they remember, and how they use that in everyday life. Toki. Number one is Moses. He started all of this work and so, of course, number one. Number two, here is going to help me now. She's very inquisitive. Number three is Aldous. Number 8 is Charles Darwin. 9 is salt and number 300 is Gerard Butler. But she was we do like to see similarities between us and other animals. The pro is but if we start to see reptiles is more like us, we will start potentially calf in the bathroom care what happens to the mall, but also we need to remember that we can't and shouldn't treat them like mammals. Everybody you sleep well too. Happy in his beak is broken. So that's probably not a great sign. We would expect to be to come down like this. It's not fair that simply survival shows. You're doing something right? It shows you're not doing everything wrong. But these guys are really remarkable survivors. Do you know he has a capacity for happiness? It's difficult to say whether Tuttle has a capacity for happiness because it didn't go to school, to say, won't happen. This is if it is to have desires and have your design is Matt, then Sunday because they would have a design for food, you can meet that, they would have a design of a song, you can meet that. So, they do potentially leaving snowy recognizes Larry. His could remember the face of the cameras and the voice of that Kara's. What's the way I think would really enjoy? Having would be a bigger area with lots more things that he can explore, and absolutely taken for those wolves outside. He's going to love it. Wow, check it out as well. Just got a thousand times bigger. Call, Fresh Air Lake Breeze. Beautiful day. Great day to be a turtle. He thinks he's escaping or just exploring. All the things that we've learned on this journey, have put him in a different light before this all started. It was just okay. I'm going down to feed the turtle now. It's like snowy. What's going to happen there? It's dumping drops in the cage. Well, it is a turtle and we're all pretending to know what the turtles thinking or doing. But that's what makes it fun. It's snowy out lives. You. What would you say at your funeral. Say? He was a good guy and a loyal master. He took care of me every day when and when their ties were nobody else was paying them any attention. You would honor you. I think so. Camden. 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