‘Endless Cookie’ Review – Boundless Delights And The Eternal Story
Endless Cookie, a family documentary 9 years in the making by filmmaker and animator Seth Scriver. It’s rooted in Toronto culture from the 80s and 90s, but pays special attention to Seth’s half-brother Pete and his life in Shamattawa, a First Nations community in Manitoba. As Seth says himself in the film’s opening to the anthropomorphized square ruler from the film board, there to deliver the good news that his grant has been approved, “the goal is to make something funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true.” What Scriver creates is less a documentary in the way today’s audiences understand them, but a patchwork of a multigenerational family’s personal stories by way of oral tradition, embellished by a continually tongue-in-cheek visual treatment via Seth’s unique art style. Each person in the feature is represented by some visual manifestation of their persona or name, like Cookie (whom the film is partially named after), who has a giant chocolate chip cookie for a head, or one of their dogs, Nutty, who is just a four-legged rendering of Mr. Peanut with a colored tongue happily wagging out of their mouth.
Despite the daunting nature of Scriver’s “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true” goal, he achieves it and more. What he has endearingly created is a result of true collaboration and respect. He and his half-brother Peter end up delivering something of monumental value to the world and his family living within it, the ultimate gift he could give: creativity, love and immortalization of a culture that is fading fast from modern life. Pete’s stories about his childhood, friends, and tangents about anything that reminds him of another story color the film’s background and provide Seth with purpose to document and visit Shamattawa. The entire film is animated largely by Seth, who successfully renders everything in both Toronto and Shamattawa life in a uniform mismatch of cartoonish grotesquerie that only makes the mundane more comical, the already funny more hilarious.
While Pete starts telling his stories, Seth offers up a respectful yet futile early attempt to stay silent during them, other family members not hesitating to make noise or interject with unrelated conversation and responses. Oftentimes they provide compelling stories of their own that intersect or interrupt with Pete’s, which is always taken in interest and never throws off the momentum despite how messy it may seem. Each anecdote is faithfully attended in time, especially a story of Pete’s that keeps getting interrupted — surrounding a trap set in the woods that goes off in his hand that takes nearly the whole film to get back to — yet never actually goes anywhere, in a flourish of whimsical anti-humor that can only come so naturally to Pete and his family.
Over the course of the documentary, the family suffers the loss of housing in a burnt-down teepee and sets to work on building a new one for Chris: a member of the family depicted as completely covered under mismatched gear as a makeshift, post-apocalyptic styled armor complete with cloth wrapped around his head and small circular goggles not unlike what you’d see on a Tusken raider in Star Wars. Everyone pitches in to build what they can to set a foundation and build on top of that, returning every few days to continue work until the job is completed.
Among the humorous manner in which these stories are told, there is a lot of sorrow and injustice circling the Scrivers and their extended family and friends. Rather, their struggles are illustrated within the larger world of repeated prejudices committed against Black, indigenous and people of color. Some instances of events have an easier solution, such as Chris’s teepee, but others, not so much. Each story is more or less peppered with the reality of fear that any action can result in kidnapping, imprisonment, relocation or death. The stories of those who faced some of the above will never be forgotten.
But Pete and Seth’s omnipresent and overlapping sense of humor conquers the despair bubbling under the surface within tales told of institutional racism; ever present is the generational distaste of fascistic law enforcement, expressed through comedic defiance in stories that happen solely because of their meddling; the playful treatment of an honorary family member who was kidnapped for most of his adolescence outlines both how wrong of a choice it was for him to be taken in the first place, and pokes fun at how he sounded like Brando’s Don Corleone when recovering in the hospital. The jokes brace you for moments of heart-shattering hardship and end up softening those blows when voiced as tender and mirthful by the people who lived through them.
Endless Cookie is, at its core, about storytelling. There’s more to a series of events than simply recounting them for an audience who wasn’t there; certain types of portrayals are essential to connecting what information is being communicated across that is received as a story. And Seth Scriver’s uniquely invented iconography for what his brother Pete’s stories look like serves as an extraordinary lens through which to focus stories like his and others like it in the extended Scriver family. What he achieves in embellishing his family’s stories opens the door to a family who truly feels comfortable and at home with each other, providing a warm and inviting atmosphere that bids you welcome to sit at their table and while away with them.
Each illustrated frame is stuffed with visual jokes for anyone with eyes to see, ranging from hyper-local Toronto references from decades past and present to gags that are just funny for anyone, regardless of location or upbringing. Often during various segments Endless Cookie brought to mind the equally absurd yet heartfelt animated feature Barber Westchester from 2022’s Fantastic Fest, both of which continually sets their own boundaries of reality, obliterate them, and create new foundations of understanding using the crudest or most elaborate methods of symbolism to persuade us that these worlds of distorted simulacra functions on a deep & emotional level.
Many moments come loaded with both pop culture and ancestral imagery: younger Anthony becomes engrossed in a video game in a captivating segment where a crosshair aims towards various white Canadian dignitaries, prizes for their freshly dropped corpses awarded include varying amounts of money, buildings of institutional power like the Manitoba Legislative Building, or just the satisfaction of seeing their line of power end on a video screen. Anthony gets up for a break and stumbles into another attempt of Pete’s to tell the trap story to tell his own, appearing alongside Pete in his past predicament to illustrate his recounting of being visited and communicated with by the spirits of their people.
The interruption is welcomed, perhaps partially because Pete knows his story doesn’t really have an ending, but more so because of the importance of Anthony’s vision, gaining genuine awe and acknowledgment of what true sorts of power his experience represents. It’s moments like these in Endless Cookie that prove how important and necessary moments like these are in humanity, and it manages to shift on a dime from tear-streakingly hysterical to deserved reverence towards the significance of events anyone can experience in life. For such a project that contains as much humanity and compassion as it does, Seth’s use of inhuman physical characteristics amplifies the actions of kindness and innocent curiosity that each family member gives forth.
You see the humanity in how every person acts and communicates, rather than focusing solely on the absurd aspects of characterization they are granted visually by Seth Scriver. In fact, only the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (or RCMP as referenced in the film) is represented as anything remotely human. Their actions speak for themselves as to the content of their character when they are introduced as panicking and calling for backup after hearing shots without investigating. Their vehicle stuck in the snow, they remain inside while a squad car, possessed by two silhouettes, arrest a walking trophy for firing his rifle on Shamattawa land, the real reason never once explored or asked about before pushing a plea deal on him.
Admittedly, Endless Cookie will not be for everyone (what film is?), but this is one of those experiences that cannot be quantified by a singular label such as “documentary,” not because it isn’t one, but because that’s only one facet of the shapes it adopts. Endless Cookie is a cultural artifact encased in digital amber, carbon dated only by the authentic voices lent to it and given second life for those who sit in a teepee just like Chris’s and commune with their family about what life was like in Toronto, in Shamattawa, on an Earth that was once habitable and populated with toilets inside the very homes they lived in during those golden days. There may be stories as old as time in our world, but we will never tire of how they’re told. That’s what makes the art of telling funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true.
Endless Cookie will debut in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on December 5, 2025, courtesy of Obscured Releasing. The film will debut on digital platforms on December 16th.
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