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Endless Cookie is available to purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver

FEATURING: Voices of Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver

PLOT: A Canadian cartoonist interviews his half-Cree brother and his numerous nephews and nieces to make an animated documentary about their shared family history.

COMMENTS: Animator Seth Scriver sets himself a difficult task. He thinks his half-brother, Pete (born to Seth’s father and an indigenous woman of the Cree tribe) is the greatest storyteller he’s ever known, and wants to document those tales. But Pete lives on the Shamattawa reservation in northern Manitoba, a location so remote that there are no roads and visitors must fly in. Pete’s large family has no experience with filmmaking, and the sound quality is so bad Steh frequently has to scrap recordings and start over. He’s excited to get a grant from Telefilm Canada, but his financial backers grow increasingly skeptical with the work-in-progress (“Is this what you’re doing with the money we gave you?” “Tell me, Seth, why is this pizza scene going on so long?”). A project that was supposed to take 7 months to complete stretches out to 9 years. But he crosses the finish line, and he and Pete finally deliver a heartfelt but oddball saga that sometimes approaches outsider art.

Seth’s lack of direction for the project becomes both a thesis and a running joke. His vague but lofty aspiration is to create a documentary that’s “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true.” Easygoing Pete is fine with the plan: “oh, okay.” The original idea is for Pete to tell seven stories, but his first attempt, a tale about the time he got his hand caught in a Conibear trap, is interrupted by the sound of a flushing toilet in the background. (Pete won’t finish this story until the end of the film.) Seth’s briefly-glimpsed flow chart for the movie is composed of irregular scribbled blobs representing scenes and looks like a bulbous, winding intestine instead of a straight arrow. The seven story structure is scrapped in favor of a laid-back method of just recording daily life and squeezing in stories as the come, an approach that better fits the documentarians’ personalities. While sitting around the table at Pete’s house—interrupted by Pete’s daughter Cookie offering to make sound effects for the film—Pete talks to his father on the phone, and Seth’s mother tells a story about a dream Pete told her, which leads the father to reminisce about a fishing trip where he encountered a strange glowing globe in the sky. And so it goes. As they slowly progress through each episode, with digressions aplenty and flashbacks nestled inside of flashbacks, a portrait emerges of Pete’s family and the way First Nations people live today: clinging to some traditions while jettisoning most for modern conveniences. This unforced, as-it-happens methodology allows the movie to touch on social topics like indigenous incarnation rates, lack of access to clean water and hunting lands, and historical injustices without seeming pedantic. Somehow, the movie ends after the apocalypse—although it eventually circles back to the present, because the past is an endless cookie.

The meandering style fits Scriver’s ADD animation style, which can best be described as “cute grotesque.” The brothers are drawn as clowns assembled from Mr. Potato Head parts, with plastic hats perched atop their rotund heads and big floppy noses; they wouldn’t look out of place in Yellow Submarine. Other characters become anthropomorphic trophies, slices of toast, right-angle rulers, or baby onions—not to mention the eponymous Cookie, who’s an actual talking chocolate chip cookie. Scriver puts enormous detail into every deceptively crude Flash animation frame, and indulges in surreal flights of fancy at every opportunity: coffee cups add commentary, real characters intrude on the stories (and vice versa), and a suicidal family member drives an eyeball motorcycle into a desert eternity. Endless Cookie is never visually dull, to say the least, and although some people can’t connect with the meandering storytelling, it resolves into a conversational format: one idea sparks another as stories wind their way through the tapestry of life, indifferent to temporal and physical laws. In the end, Scriver checks off his list of “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true”; he just forgot to add “and kind of weird.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… the film… boasts so much mirth and good will that the strangeness becomes grounded in universal feelings of warmth and togetherness. The surreal becomes identifiable and relatable… It’s a weird kind of hang out movie where the door is always open, either to engage directly or to just let all the strangeness wash over the viewer.”–Andrew Parker, The Gate (festival screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by Sean Ramsdell. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)