‘Endless Cookie’ review: Annecy’s Contrechamp winner is an inventive portrait of Canadian half-brothers

Dirs: Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver. Canada. 2025. 97mins

The riffing, noodling conversations between two Canadian half-brothers – one Indigenous and one white – are the premise for this idiosyncratic and affectionate animated documentary. The goal was to create one thing “humorous, lovely, religious, political, advanced, easy and true”. The Scriver brothers achieve just about all of this and, with the movie’s quirky, psychedelic fashion of pc animation, create one thing genuinely sudden and visually playful. It’s a image infused with love – each for household, and for the artistic act (the movie took almost a decade to finish). It’s also a beneficiant invitation into the center of a sprawling prolonged household from Toronto-based Seth Scriver and his older brother Peter, who lives in Shamattawa, a First Nations reserve in northern Manitoba. 

 Intimate, humorous and vibrant 

That is the second animated characteristic from Seth Scriver following Asphalt Watches (2013), co-directed with Shayne Ehman and which gained greatest Canadian first characteristic movie at Toronto earlier than taking part in in Annecy and different festivals. Infinite Cookie, which premiered at Sundance, has gained a number of prizes together with Annecy’s Contrechamp grand prix and the Movie Ahead Golden Alexander at Thessaloniki Worldwide Documentary Competition. Additional competition slots appear possible and, whereas adult-themed animation is historically a tricky promote theatrically, the image may proceed its journey by means of a Lots of Of Beavers-style bespoke repertory technique or by way of a streaming platform launch. 

The movie opens with Seth receiving an ’Discover and Create’ award from a (barely fictionalised) Canadian movie physique, which supplies him the go-ahead to pursue the title that may ultimately change into Infinite Cookie. The film-body consultant (depicted as a gray, L-square ruler, one of many few emphatically straight strains within the image) struggles to understand the mission that’s proposed by Seth (monumental spherical face, tiny pink hat, hoodie and a inexperienced, gherkin-shaped nostril).

There’s a operating joke all through the image, which sees Seth pleading repeatedly for a deadline extension and trying to justify among the extra outlandish scenes, like a conversational segue into the historical past of ’Pure Finders’, Victorian dog-poo collectors who offered their wares to the leather-based tanning trade. Along with the whole lot else, Infinite Cookie casts an ironic eye over the filmmaking course of itself, exploring the struggles of creating a wholly animated movie in a distant location (there isn’t a direct highway to Shamattawa) utilizing audio that’s continually interrupted by youngsters, relations or one in every of Peter’s quite a few canine. 

Removed from ruining the integrity of a scene, these interruptions are woven into the material of the movie and explored by Seth’s creatively weird animated interpretations. The distractions, the sound of a bathroom flushing, the digital noise machine that Peter’s daughter performs with continually, the muffled squeaks of a litter of puppies underneath the steps: all of that is what imbues Infinite Cookie with its appreciable heat and amiable allure. 

Peter, in line with his youthful brother, is “top-of-the-line storytellers I do know”. And so it proves, on this movie that additionally time-travels to Toronto within the Seventies and ’80s, dipping into Peter’s tequila-and-punk interval, then pinballs into an imagined future by which Seth remains to be labouring over the movie. Peter’s tales are meandering and digressive – it takes virtually the whole operating time of the movie for him to succeed in the tip of a story about getting his hand caught in a bear entice. However whereas Peter’s tales might not all the time have a transparent vacation spot, the journey that the brothers invite us on is intimate, humorous and vibrant (in each sense of the phrase).