Endless Cookie Review: Two Brothers Explore Family and Canadas First Nations Community in a Winning Animated Doc

They don’t come along often, but I’m a sucker for a good animated documentary.

From Flee to Tower to Waltz With Bashir to definition-stretchers like the Aardman Creature Comforts shorts or Grand Theft Hamlet, animated documentaries offer an aesthetic remove that draws attention to how little visual imagination so often goes into the genre.

Seth Scriver and Pete Scriver’s Endless Cookie, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, surely doesn’t lack for imagination. It’s a wildly whimsical, sometimes funny and sometimes pointed documentary about family, storytelling and the often circular nature of time.

What Endless Cookie perhaps lacks is focus and clarity, but the doc’s messiness largely fits its subject matter and the rambling, protracted nature of its production. It’s a trippy, meandering journey, but the moments of amusement and insight are ample.

The story begins with Seth, represented with a droopy, blue phallic nose, tiny red hat and wiry, sparse mustache, receiving a grant from NFG Canada (a stand-in for the National Film Board of Canada), represented as a right-angle ruler, to do an animation project. Toronto-based Seth’s plan is to go to the First Nations community of Shamattawa to interview his brother Pete.

Pete, represented with a somewhat erect red nose, blue lips, glasses and a black cap, is 16 years older and Indigenous, though they share a white father. Pete is the best storyteller Seth knows, so Seth wants to record a selection of Pete’s tales, presenting them with accompanying animation.

“The goal is to make something funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true. That should be easy, right?” Seth says, promising his brother the shared directing credit that he has on the final film.

The brothers sit down and, as Pete’s menagerie of children come and go, interrupting the conversation and supplying their own background soundtrack, Pete begins to tell a story about a time he got caught in his own bear trap in the forest. Pete returns to the story several times throughout the 97-minute movie, but for the life of me, I’m not sure if he ever finishes it, which is surely part of the point.

Over the course of the documentary, Pete and other residents of Shamattawa tell various stories — many related to the historical injustices faced by Canada’s First Nations people, a few weirdly supernatural, some related to the frustrations of their current lives, many related to Pete’s youth in 1970s and 1980s Toronto, including drunken, naked misadventures and teenage pranks. The stories sometimes have stories nested within them, with each retelling causing the tales to get shaggier and less formed. Pete’s kids, who grow from children into teens and young adults over the nine years in which Seth is struggling to get the film made (much to the chagrin of the right angle ruler from the NFG, who periodically offers useless notes), get to tell their own stories, some enhanced with the use of recreational drugs.

The theme of the documentary ends up being that “the past is an endless cookie,” a reference either to its general circularity or to Pete’s daughter Cookie, visualized as an adorable talking chocolate chip cookie. Or, explained a different way, “You look to the past, try to make it easy for the future.”

Because the documentary is mostly the loose conversations between Seth, Pete, Pete’s odd and eclectic family and the various residents of Shamattawa, captured as audio with very little agenda or evident direction, the thing that Endless Cookie feels most like is the early semi-improvised animated comedies created or co-created by Loren Bouchard. It isn’t as funny as Home Movies or Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, but Endless Cookie has a charm of its own, as it captures Pete’s easygoing attitude or the ready-for-the-spotlight hamminess of the kids, who age throughout in ways that are generally unremarked upon.

The humor comes from the raw but vibrant animation, of the sort you might see on an Adult Swim short. Seth Scriver’s approach tends toward amusing, broad characterizations and frequent anthropomorphizing, like the British bulldog serving as a judge in a provincial court, or symbolism, like a railroaded defendant whose attorney is a literal clown. The characters navigate environments that alternate between pretty, impressionistic depictions of the Canadian wilderness, the bustling and caricature-driven streets of flashback Toronto, and the detailed clutter of different characters’ homes. The film breaks from animation whenever a character shows a picture on their phone or in an album, instances in which we see the real people; it’s surprisingly poignant to see how they’ve been represented in cartoon form in ways that instantly capture their spirit.

My favorite setting in the series is the community’s only grocery store, fittingly named “No Other Store,” an emporium packed with processed brand-name sodas and frozen foods and wildly overpriced produce. It’s one of several scathing looks at the treatment of Canada’s First Nations communities; the tone is affectionate and warm toward the people themselves, less so toward the outside authorities and history that includes residential schools and the like. There’s some overlap in content here between Endless Cookie and Netflix/CBC’s Inuk comedy North of North, which I mean as a high compliment.

Endless Cookie doesn’t really “end” so much as Seth reaches a point at which he knows if he doesn’t wrap the documentary up he might never finish it. It’s an abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion, but it’s hard to know what “satisfying conclusion” this documentary could have. It’s an appropriate destination for a documentary that’s a messy, disjointed and appealingly affectionate look at relationships and a location we’re rarely exposed to, animated or otherwise.