Endless Cookies review – Cheech and Chong meet Tristram Shandy in a trilogy of tales of First Nations life | film

TThe call for better self-representation of minorities in cinema has been loud and long over the past decade, and if that means more left-wing work like this crazy, mind-blowing but utterly adorable cartoon about the lives of an Indigenous Canadian family in Cree territory, then keep it up. It can almost be described as when Cheech and Chong meet Tristram Shandy, Endless Cookie is constantly interrupting herself and making fun of her creation methods – especially the fact that it took half-brothers Seth and Peter Scriver nine years to finish the thing. At one point, in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Toronto, Seth announces that he has another deadline extension: “Awesome!”

Animator Seth (voicing himself) heads to the Shamattawa First Nation community in Manitoba to record his half-brother Peter (also voicing himself, as do other family members); Peter’s mother, unlike Seth’s mother, was First Nations. His tales revolve around a variety of shaggy dogs – which include 12 on their property, two of whom are actually named Cheech and Chong – as well as the seven resident children. The stories are many and strange: building the tent; observing a botched murder involving caribou; Peter’s angry mission in Toronto in the 1980s; A friend is approached by a clinging snowy owl; A long saga about the embarrassment of mutilating his hand in his animal trap.

Seth struggles to contain Scheherazade Shamattawa. Staring at the story map bulging out like a distended colon, he thinks: “I’m not sure if she’s following me or I’m following her.” With an animation system that resembles SpongeBob SquarePants after an afternoon spent smoking DMT, one of the film’s financiers appears as a talking chip base – but he gets off lightly compared to the extended family. The proximal constant is a different oscillating proboscis for each organ; This is the kind of photography you can’t get away with unless you’re deeply in love with all the people involved.

There are serious points raised with ironic ambiguity here: about police racism, land theft, and, more positively, ancestral continuity. (Perhaps to maintain the focus on the indigenous population, Endless Cookie sidesteps the issue of Seth as a white chronicler.) But it’s also equal parts coffee-froth hallucination from the squiggly curry—and a distinctly radiant love of community—in this often funny riff on the likes of Fritz the Cat.