AFI FEST Review: Endless Cookie is an invitation to a weird, warm family hang

A lot of families, mine included, have a person who's known as the great storyteller. In my family, it was my Aunt Cynthia. She was the funniest person you'd ever meet, so full of life, an impossibly quick wit, endless warmth. She sometimes wrote "chapters" from a memoir, which she called I Miss Me, and would email them to various family members. I remember receiving some in college, and laughing until I cried reading that email. My roommate came in to make sure I was okay, I was cackling so loud. She had such a way with words, and such a way with people. To know her was to love her, and to be known by her was to feel loved, seen, important.

Sadly, she passed away six years ago. But she's someone who lives on in all of her nieces and nephews, her siblings, everyone who knew her. I still think of her often, and wish we had more time together.

She was weighing on my mind as I watched Endless Cookie, a movie that has loomed large in my imagination all year. Ever since I heard about it, I was fascinated. The unique art style, the content, the animation. It sounded like a fascinating watch. And it is certainly that. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more unique animated movie released this year. It's also deeply personal. There were times where I felt like I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing, but even in those moments, there's something so warm and inviting about watching this movie. It feels like an invitation into a deeply private place.

Not that that place is private because it's super dark or ugly or prickly or anything else. But because it's the sort of mundane, insular, day-to-day of other people's lives that we don't really get to see. There are the faces we wear when we're on our own, or with our families or close friends. The faces that are never revealed to the world at large, and certainly not in a movie. In Endless Cookie, it feels like we get to see those faces of this family, even though we are (for the most part) not seeing their actual faces at all, but rather the bizarro animated versions of them.

Let me try to untangle the wild web of what Endless Cookie is. Seth Scriver, a Canadian animator and comic artist, gets a grant to create an animate movie, and a deadline to turn his work in seven months later (spoiler alert: the movie ends up taking nine years to make). Scriver's pitch for the film is to animate a bunch of stories, and so he turns to his brother Peter, who's the best storyteller he knows. Seth is white, and lives in Toronto. Peter, who's sixteen years older, is a member of the Shamattawa First Nation tribe, and lives on the tiny reserve left to them by the. Canadian government. To the casual observer, you would never guess they're brothers.

Peter lives with his sprawling family, and many dogs, in a cramped and lively house. As the movie begins, we're treated to a massive parade of characters we'll meet, and I have to say, I felt overwhelmed. There are so many characters, but it ends up a lot of them just sort of flit around the periphery or in the background. You don't have to keep up too much, and the film does a good job of telling you who's who as it goes. As this is a documentary, everyone's voicing themselves for the most part. Or rather, the animation is bringing to life the various recordings Seth makes.

So many of Seth's recordings are a bit jumbled, peppered with interruptions, unwanted sound effects, what I would call rabbit trails (when the conversation goes off in unexpected directions). There's one story that Peter starts telling early in the film that we keep coming back to over and over again throughout the film, each time getting a little closer to the conclusion. But it takes, like, four different sessions before we finally hear the ending.

And what's kind of funny to me, ironic even, is that Peter isn't an amazing storyteller. But there is something about him that's magnetic. It isn't exactly his words, but more his personality and delivery. He has an absolutely infectious laugh. And even though a lot of his stories end up being kind of small beans, I get it. I was so happy to be hearing from him, to hear about these little scenes and moments from his life that made enough of an impact on him to recall and share all these years later.

There's some meta commentary throughout, as well, as Seth shows the grant representative footage from the film (the rep looks like one of those right-angle ruler things, which is the logo of the company), and most of it is met with disbelief. Like, why are you including this? And there's a part of me that was wondering the same thing, but then, that's what makes this movie so special. It's so specific to these people, to Peter in particular, that it's like the most obscure little time capsule you can imagine. It made me think of how special it would be if I had a movie like this that centered on Cynthia, that had recordings of her telling her best stories, ones where you could probably barely hear her because the rest of the family's laughter would be drowning out her words.

And so Endless Cookie feels like a gift, maybe one that Seth is giving to himself, his nieces and nephews, the rest of the family. It's a way to preserve the person that Peter is, but also the people that all of them are, and were, the people they became over the course of the nine years it took to make this movie.

And this time capsule also feels a bit radical in its joyfulness. You can feel the love in this family, and the joy, despite all the circumstances surrounding them that ought to dim their light a bit. The film touches on various societal issues in Canada that affect Indigenous people, such as racist policing, the over-representation of First Nations people in prisons, poverty, issues of access to clean water, and the residential schools that separated Indigenous children from their families. There are so many huge, structural problems that are stacked against Peter and his family, but they retain their sense of community (and their sense of humor).

I would be remiss not to talk about the look of the movie, because this is crazy-looking (complimentary). All of the characters look radically different from each other, with some not even looking like humans. There's a huge range of skin tones, shapes, dimensions. Even the dogs have wildly diverse appearances, including one who looks like a literal peanut (his name is Nutty, naturally). The animation has an appealingly low-res look to it. It was almost completely animated by Seth using the Adobe suite, and it has the feel of something made on a small scale like that. You literally never know what you're going to see next, and sometimes it's even puzzling what you're looking at, but always in a way that's enjoyable, and intriguing.

Wherever you're coming from, and wherever you're going, Endless Cookie is a wonderful, weird little pit stop to rest at along the way. It has such a great hangout vibe -- it's just a pleasure to be around this family -- and it's full of strange surprises and startling insights that make it all the more textured and memorable. It's raw and rough in the way that few movies could ever dream of being, and for that, I'm so grateful.

Endless Cookie is playing at AFI FEST here in LA as part of the After Dark section on Sunday, October 26 at 9:30pm.