The call for better self-representation for minorities in cinema has been loud and long over the last decade, and if it means more left-field work like this loopy, brain-fried but thoroughly affable animation about the lives of a Canadian Cree Indigenous family, then keep it coming. Roughly describable as Cheech and Chong meet Tristram Shandy, Endless Cookie consistently interrupts itself and lampoons the methods of its own creation \u2013 especially the fact it took half-brothers Seth and Peter Scriver nine years to finish the thing. At one point Seth, in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Toronto, announces he has another deadline extension: \u201cCool!\u201d<\/p>\n
Animator Seth (who voices himself) heads up to the Shamattawa First Nation community in Manitoba to tape his half-brother Peter (also voicing himself, as do other family members); Peter\u2019s mother, unlike Seth\u2019s, was First Nations. His tales are of the shaggy-dog variety \u2013 featuring the 12 pooches on their property, two of whom actually are called Cheech and Chong \u2013 as well as the seven kids in residence. The stories are manifold and strange: teepee construction; a botched murder stakeout involving a caribou; Peter\u2019s angry-punk stint in 80s Toronto; a friend accosted by a clingy snowy owl; a drawn-out saga about the embarrassment of mangling his hand in his own animal trap.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Seth struggles to contain the Scheherazade of Shamattawa. Gazing at a story map bulging like a distended colon, he muses: \u201cI\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s following me, or I\u2019m following it.\u201d Under an animation regime that is like SpongeBob SquarePants after an afternoon smoking DMT, one of the film\u2019s funders features as a talking slide rule \u2013 but he gets off lightly compared to the the extended family. The one near constant is a different wibbly proboscis for each member; the kind of depiction you can only get away with if you\u2019re deeply fond of everyone concerned.<\/p>\n
There are serious points raised with wry obliqueness here: about police racism, land theft and, more positively, ancestral continuity. (Perhaps to keep the indigenous focus, Endless Cookie skirts the issue of Seth as a white chronicler.) But it\u2019s also equal parts hallucinations in coffee froth of rutting caribous \u2013 and a palpably radiating love for community \u2013 in this often hilarious spawn of the likes of Fritz the Cat.<\/p>\n
Endless Cookie is on Mubi from 17 April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The call for better self-representation for minorities in cinema has been loud and long over the last decade,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-583523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}