By John Corrado
The animated documentary Endless Cookie, which won the Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary at Hot Docs, offers a quirky portrait of half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver.
Seth is a white animator living in Toronto, using a government grant to make a film about his Indigenous half-brother Pete, who lives in Shamattawa. The money goes to flying out to the First Nations reserve in Northern Manitoba, so that he can spend time with his brother’s family and record him telling stories.
Seth is making the film as a way to capture his brother’s skills as a storyteller. As such, Endless Cookie plays out as a meandering, often aimless series of “shaggy dog” stories that Pete likes to tell, which run the gamut from engaging to absurd and seemingly inane. Pete will reminisce about his time living in Toronto in the 1980s, or talk about getting his hand stuck in a leg-hold trap. Seth’s audio is constantly being interrupted by Pete’s family (and dogs) making noise in the background, so they get woven into the stories as well.
Narratively, the film is rambling and messy, but that’s also sort of the point. This is a collection of anecdotes, all presented in Seth’s incredibly crude and colourful animation style. Every drawing is peppered with little in-jokes in the background, as well as nods to First Nations life and Canadian history. The character designs are highly stylized (we only see the subjects’ human forms in onscreen photographs), and the overall look of it is very cartoony. This gives everything a surrealistic, at times psychedelic bent.
The film jumps between past, present, and imagined future, with elements of what feels like a drug trip at times. There is a meta touch to all of this as well, with the through-line of Seth struggling to finish the movie, and essentially trolling the government grant officer (voiced by Michael Clifton) who presents him with a giant cheque at the beginning and expects to see results by a certain date. As Seth shows him footage along the way, there is a pile of burning cash beside him.
How long it’s taking to finish the film is even a running joke within, including the backdrop of the family taking ages to rebuild a tipi that burned down. Seth’s niece Cookie (voiced by Kristin Scriver), whom the film is named for and is portrayed as a chocolate chip cookie, even grows up over the course of the project, which all told took nine years to finish.
The film is all over the place with its freewheeling, episodic structure, and it does feel somewhat stretched out and overlong at 97 minutes. The mix of sometimes inventive and occasionally grotesque imagery can also invoke sensory overload at times. But, if it doesn’t all work equally well, Endless Cookie is still somewhat admirable for how it upends conventions of non-fiction filmmaking.
This is basically the documentary version of a hangout film, with the animation adding another layer on top of that. It’s crude and loose in both style and form, but what unexpectedly emerges is a deeply idiosyncratic and oddly warmhearted portrait of a sprawling but undeniably loving family.
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