‘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 idea for this idiosyncratic and affectionate animated documentary. The intention was to create one thing “humorous, stunning, non secular, political, advanced, easy and true”. The Scriver brothers achieve just about all of this and, with the movie’s quirky, psychedelic type of laptop animation, create one thing genuinely surprising 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 is usually 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 function from Seth Scriver following Asphalt Watches (2013), co-directed with Shayne Ehman and which gained greatest Canadian first function movie at Toronto earlier than enjoying in Annecy and different festivals. Limitless 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 Pageant. Additional competition slots appear possible and, whereas adult-themed animation is historically a tricky promote theatrically, the image might proceed its journey by means of a A whole bunch 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 provides him the go-ahead to pursue the title that may ultimately develop into Limitless Cookie. The film-body consultant (depicted as a gray, L-square ruler, one of many few emphatically straight traces within the image) struggles to understand the venture that’s proposed by Seth (huge spherical face, tiny crimson 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 making an attempt to justify a few of the extra outlandish scenes, like a conversational segue into the historical past of ’Pure Finders’, Victorian dog-poo collectors who bought their wares to the leather-based tanning business. Along with every little thing else, Limitless Cookie casts an ironic eye over the filmmaking course of itself, exploring the struggles of creating a completely animated movie in a distant location (there isn’t any direct street to Shamattawa) utilizing audio that’s continually interrupted by youngsters, members of the family or certainly one of Peter’s quite a few canines. 

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 beneath the steps: all of that is what imbues Limitless Cookie with its appreciable heat and amiable attraction. 

Peter, in response to 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 wherein Seth continues to be labouring over the movie. Peter’s tales are meandering and digressive – it takes nearly all the operating time of the movie for him to succeed in the top of a story about getting his hand caught in a bear lure. 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).