In “Endless Cookie,” Seth and Pete Scriver’s kooky, grotesquely animated documentary, a rich oral history poetically blended with oddball comedy invites surprising political revelations.
With its audio composed primarily of recorded conversations between Seth and Pete spanning eight years, the movie also features the voices of each director’s real-life family persistently interrupting to share their own stories. Coherence, therefore, isn’t the aim here; this is the cinematic translation of a community.
The half brothers Seth and Pete come from racially dissimilar backgrounds. Seth, who also animated the film, is white and lives in Toronto; Pete is white and Indigenous, fluent in Cree, and resides on the Shamattawa First Nation reserve in Manitoba. Their exchange of memories inspires their dreamlike movie to wobble between the 1980s, the present and sometimes even the future. That temporal kineticism mirrors Pete’s absurd rural yarns, which range from recalling watching caribou mating to intermittently recounting how he escaped his own beaver trap.
Behind the moments of levity in “Endless Cookie” are also harsh truths. A car radio reports that systematic harassment by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has led to higher rates of incarceration among Indigenous people in Canada. And further social statements are peppered throughout the dense animation: Their supermarket’s frozen food section features a TV dinner called “Colonial Trauma” and “Let’s Eat the Billionaires Chicken Fingers.” That these jokes land without overt righteousness is another good mark for a film covered with many.
Endless Cookie Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.
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