“Endless Cookie” begins with an account of how the film began production, which is not a particularly interesting story: half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver received a grant for funding they needed to direct an animated project together, and Seth flew from Toronto to Pete’s home in the remote First Nations community of Shamattawa to brainstorm on the stories they wanted the film to incorporate.
What makes the opening few minutes captivating is how this is all presented. The representative of NFG Canada that provided the grant is depicted as a bent ruler. Seth’s wife has an onion head, and he himself is a pale, flabby, blue-nosed figure that only vaguely resembles the contours of a real human being. When he calls his brother to break the news, the film zooms out to a map of North America with a sleeping face stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And as Seth rattles on about the goal of the film — to make “something funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true” — emojis line up on screen to represent every descriptor.
With a hand-drawn aesthetic that combines a little DNA from indie ’90s comics, retro video games, and children’s picture books, “Endless Cookie” is a wonderfully grotesque, beautifully surreal visual experience. Animated by Scriver, the film’s psychedelic world is one with only a passing relationship to logic, populated with dogs shaped like peanuts and daughters shaped like cookies, where pictures on a wall can speak and time can jump from the present day to a future apocalypse and back again in the blink of an eye. It’s a hazy, confounding experience, but also a warm delight — using its hallucinatory animation to tell a down-to-Earth, relatable history of a family.
Much of the film takes place in Pete’s living room, where he and Seth recorded several conversations from 2016 to 2024, the audio of which provides the basis for most of the vignettes featured within the film. We get a general sense of their relationship: they share a father, but Seth is white while the older Pete is indigenous, though the two were raised for some time together in the Kensington Market neighborhood of Toronto. As the two chat, Pete throws out a few stories he wants to incorporate into the film, starting with an account of how he got his own hand caught in a beaver trap.
But while Pete keeps trying to head back to the story, he only just barely manages to finish the loop by the time the film rambles its way to an ending. Instead, the sheer bulk of “Endless Cookie” consists of a whole bunch of digressions. Some come from Pete and Seth themselves, as they go off topic to discuss Pete’s youth as a teen in Toronto, ordering terrible pizza and slacking off with his friends. Some come from Pete’s large family, consisting of nine children, 10 dogs, and a whole bunch of other relatives, who interrupt to offer their own tales or musings about life in Shamattawa. And some come from Seth, as his animation takes turns into the absurdist, from parodies of old video games to a commercial for a city made of toilets.
Where one vignette ends and another begins is intentionally difficult to parse; this is a free-flowing narrative, where the storytelling is zigs and circles back on itself rather than proceeding in a straight line. Occasionally, it can veer on a little exhausting, but for the most part, the approach is soothing in its way, and endearing in how it fleshes out this family as a very rambunctious and colorful, tight-knit unit. The stories they tell, of rebuilding a teepee that burned or witnessing the wildlife mating, are lightly amusing and sweet, accompanied by a chipper, whistling score that amplifies the slice-of-life charm.
Although most of “Endless Cookie” is cheerfully comedic, it also very much lives up to the “political” descriptor Seth aimed for in the opening. At several points, the movie exposes its politics visually, such as a memorable scene inside a supermarket where the frozen food aisles are filled with products like “Let’s Eat the Billionaires Chicken Fingers.” Mostly, however, it comes from the real experiences of First Nations people in Canada, as shared by Pete and his family. Early on, a car radio reports on systemic harassment from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that has led to disproportionate rates of Indigenous people being incarcerated. One particularly sad segment, narrated by an elderly friend of Pete’s family, discusses his experiences being kidnapped, separated from his family, and sent to one the infamous Canadian Indigenous Residential Schools as a child.
Still, “Endless Cookie” doesn’t dwell on the tragedy: while it makes a point on the importance of looking at the past, it also celebrates the joy of community and the passing of culture down from generation to generation. Late in the movie, as the cast looks through a camera, we see real pictures of Pete, Seth, and all of their loved ones for the first time. It’s to the credit of “Endless Cookie” that you already feel like you know them all — even if you only knew them as, well, a cookie.
Grade: B
Obscured Releasing will release “Endless Cookie” in Los Angeles and New York theaters on Friday, December 5.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.