Animated film Endless Cookie tackles racism, residential schools and Canadian smugness with brotherly love
When Toronto animator Seth Scriver toured his 2013 film Asphalt Watches in the United States, he was repeatedly complimented on how well Canadians treated the environment and Indigenous people.
Scriver wasn't having it.
'I would tell them, 'Oh, man, sorry to tell you, but maybe that's not fully true.''
Scriver, 47, is white. His half-brother, Peter Scriver, 62, is Indigenous and lives in Shamattawa First Nation, a Cree community in remote northern Manitoba. In setting non-Canadians straight about the intricate realities of Indigenous life in the country, Seth often found himself retelling stories he'd heard from 'Pete.'
Those conversations and those stories are the spine to Endless Cookie, a cartooned, absurdist film that not only documents the chaotic life of his Indigenous brother, but touches on issues such as residential schools, land claims, institutional racism and the smug attitude of Canadians who feel superior to their American counterparts.
'It was neat to sneak attack people with truths and lessons within fun animation,' Seth says, speaking on a Zoom call along with his brother.
Endless Cookie opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg on Friday. It premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival to warm reviews − 'colorful anecdotes about Indigenous Canadian life amuse in wacky animated doc,' said Variety − and took the Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. More recently, the film opened Toronto's imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival.
Despite the earthy, comical vignettes and idiosyncratic animation − Peter's nose resembles a toilet plunger − the homespun Endless Cookie is ultimately a soulful story about a far-out, far-north family (including nine children and almost twice as many dogs) and the brothers' endearing camaraderie.
'If you can get the audience to connect to the characters in an unexpected way, which I think this film does very well, it's also an unexpected way to find some real humanity,' said Daniel Bekerman, one of Endless Cookie's producers.
Bekerman founded Toronto's Scythia Films and was one of the producers behind 2024's The Apprentice, about the pre-presidential Donald Trump. He was introduced to Seth's work through Asphalt Watches, which he found to be subversive, psychedelic and punk rock − 'All the things I enjoy.'
Bekerman was on board with Endless Cookie almost from the beginning, which stretches back nine years or so. He worked with Seth on story ideas (and the application to Telefilm for funding).
'Seth has an incredible ability to turn every sentence into a funny or weird sequence,' Bekerman said.
Because the process of completing the film is woven into the meta storyline, Endless Cookie also portrays the struggle of indie filmmakers.
Most of the issues, no surprise, involved time and money. Seth, a carpenter on the side, was the film's solo animator. Peter is a maintenance person at a nursing station and a ranger. Seth's trips from Toronto to Shamattawa to tape conversations with his brother were expensive. When he did make the trip, the ambient interruptions of puppies yelping, children slurping and video games beeping sabotaged the audio.
'It was a real pain that it was taking so long,' Seth says. 'I was worried it would be out of date by the time it was done.'
He needn't have worried. The offbeat animation of shows such as Adventure Time and Rick and Morty is still in vogue, and audiences are increasingly receptive to Indigenous stories. Like the hit Canadian television series North of North and the pop album Inuktitut by Inuk singer-songwriter Elisapie, Endless Cookie does not depict Indigenous life as an exotic sub-genre of the mainstream.
'Through Seth's portrait of a family and through Peter's stories, the film encapsulates what it means to be Canadian, in a strange, roundabout way,' Bekerman said.
Still, the film addresses the spirituality of Indigenous people and embraces the oral tradition of lore handed down from one generation to the next.
'Before we had anything modern, we kept kids occupied sitting around and telling them stories,' Peter says. 'Besides, it's better than carrying water or chopping wood.'
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