I’ve seen a lot of animated documentaries that use the medium to tackle sensitive subject matter in ways that make the material more digestible and profound, but Endless Cookie, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, might be the farthest, and funniest, approach to this. The entire movie renders its subjects in a hyper-surrealist style that mixes flashy colors and crass humor, with many of the participants being portrayed as anthropomorphized objects. The film, a combination of vignettes mixing illustrated recorded accounts and scripted scenes, initially appears like the sort of thing that would get its directors hired by the likes of Adult Swim. Yet it’s right after you get accustomed to it that the film plays its true hand. Beneath its hangout-comedy vibe is a devastating look at the experience facing Canada’s indigenous population.

Seth Scriver has just received a grant from Canada’s prestigious “N.F.G.” to make a documentary about his half-brother Pete (with whom he decides to share directorial credit with). Seth is white but Pete is indigenous, and lives on a reservation so inaccessible that Seth can’t even visit without flying. The idea is that Pete will tell seven stories about life growing up as an indigenous person in the 1970s and 80s, in ways that are both funny and poignant, and Seth will animate over them. All he has to do is deliver the movie in seven months, the kind of goal you get when the money people don’t understand how feature animation works. Also, Seth and Peter get sidetracked. A lot.

Through a mix of stories and satirical sketches, the Scrivers paint a hilarious portrait of late twentieth century Canada. Fans of stoner/hangout comedies and cartoons like Regular Show will find a lot to love about this film’s plot threads, from Pete’s buddies stealing chickens off delivery trucks, to pressing their luck with the local pizza place’s “30 minutes or less” policy (with the restaurant eventually getting back at them in an extremely funny way). This is a film that often doesn’t take itself seriously, and it’s not afraid to veer off course. It’s freewheeling and goes where it feels like. (A small story about an animal trap takes up almost the entire runtime of the film to tell.) This also extends to the warts-and-all nature of what Seth decides to show. A lot of the early moments in the film are dedicated to trying to get clean audio, and a recurring bit involves the N.F.G. representative, portrayed as a slide ruler, repeatedly questioning Seth’s direction for the movie (as a progressively-smaller pile of money burns off to the side).

Of course, it’s not all fun and free pizza, and the movie isn’t only interested in fooling around. This is still a documentary about the indigenous experience in Canada, with recollections of police profiling, land grabs, and the specter of residential schools haunting even the most amusing of stories. Yet the film also finds way to mix its absurdist sense of humor into the proceedings. A fictional show called “Canadian Idle” shows Canadians being so passive upon hearing about indigenous incarceration rates and the factors contributing to them that they are rendered as car seats. The lawyer representing a wrongfully convicted indigenous youth is a literal snake. Police are caricatured as babbling cowards and, in probably one of the most unexpected political sequences I have ever seen in a documentary, a segment mixes the scars of colonization with a famous video game meme and a very cathartic parody of 90s first-person shooters. The tonal shifts sometimes get iffy, but for the most part, it works. There’s also a lot of great stories about Peter’s family and heritage, such his mom making snacks out of dried caribou stomach that, while he looks back on them as a fond memory of his family’s culture, he will admit smelled and tasted awful.

The animation work in this is hysterical, and really adds to the film’s tone. As mentioned, a lot of the film’s subjects are rendered as objects, such as talking socks, soda cans, and vegetables, and I loved seeing where the art style would go next. (Sometimes, actual objects end up talking too.) There’s also a ton of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it in-jokes and nods to Canadian/indigenous history sprinkled throughout for eagle-eyed viewers. Expanding the capabilities of documentary storytelling in extremely entertaining while still thought-provoking ways, it’s both a tribute to Canada’s native peoples and a good history lesson for those not in the know. I’ll be thinking about this movie for a while, and hopefully someone will pick it up so others can see it too.

The Sundance Film Festival is often the place to find the next great work of cinema, and since the pandemic, they’ve been allowing people at home to watch as well. This year, the festival selected thirteen animated shorts and one feature, Endless Cookie (which I’ll hopefully review at a later date). I unfortunately wasn’t able to watch all of them, as one short, Caries, was not available virtually. However, I did watch the rest, and I thought I’d share my picks of my favorite ones, along with an additional short that made great use of animation as well.

Paradise Man (ii) is honestly less an animated film than an inventive animated collage movie, but it was one of my favorite things I saw in the animated short film program regardless. It’s made almost entirely with repurposed images and GIFs of those white, big-headed, blank, faceless figures you find in stock media, but in the hands of Jordan Michael Blake, these nondescript cartoons take on new emotional resonance. Subtitled “Episode 1: Golf”, the short is an extended monologue by the titular Paradise Man, who initially starts out discussing his pursuit of getting a hole in one before a family tragedy causes him to reflect on his own existence and purpose. With the stock-based format and Paradise Man’s narration being supplied by a slowed-down automated voice, it initially comes across like something you’d find in the early morning on Adult Swim before hitting you with genuine and relatable poignancy. (Sundance also pointed out that Blake had previously been commissioned by Adult Swim to make a segment of their incredible anthology series Off the Air.) The short ends with the promise of a second episode, and I’m hoping Blake makes good on it. You’ll never look at stock graphics the same way again.

Arguably one of the best shorts, and the one that won the Grand Jury Prize for Animated Short Films, was As If the Earth Had Swallowed Them Up (Como si la tierra se las hubiera tragado). It tells of a woman who returns to her home of Mexico City, where she looks back on how, as a young girl, she came to terms with what happens to women in Mexico. The short’s endearing art style gives way to some truly harrowing sequences illustrating its serious subject matter, and I thought it was a great example of how animation can both make dark topics more accessible while at the same time enhancing their impact. It definitely deserved the top prize, which qualifies it for next year’s Oscars.

There were a few other shorts of note that I enjoyed. Hurikán, described as a “deep-fried romance from Prague”, follows the literally pigheaded titular character as he offers to resupply a beer stand where he has a crush on the bartender, only to find himself on the beer run from Hell. Gritty, darkly comic, and with great music, it brings to mind something out of the alternative animation of the 1990s when the film is set. Bunnyhood is a punky short from the UK that feels like a zine comic come to life. In it, Bobby learns that her mother may not always be telling the truth when a promised fast food dinner ends up being a trip to the hospital. The whole short is gleefully surreal and anarchic but not to the extent to where you can’t figure things out. Told in a crude but endearingly handcrafted animation style, this was one of my favorite watches of the selections this year. View from the Floor is a 5 minute piece in which Mindie Lind, a singer without legs, discusses her brief brush with fame, where she discovers that it wasn’t so much about her talent as it was about “inspiration porn.” A thought-provoking and funny take on how disability is perceived in the media, it’s a decent piece in its own. However, the short is actually a proof-of-concept for a feature length animated documentary of the same title, and that’s something I really hope gets off the ground because based on this, I’d love to see more.

Also, while not really an animated short, I nevertheless feel compelled to bring up a title from the documentary short film selections that uses animation in a great way. Three Sundances ago, Joe Hunting’s documentary We Met in Virtual Reality not only introduced me to the world of VRChat, but expanded my idea of what documentaries could be. Now, he’s back with The Reality of Hope, a live-action/machinima documentary short that presents a truly moving story of how fantastical virtual communities can inspire very real impact. Hiyu is a prominent member of VRChat’s Furality community, an organization of furry artists and creators, until his real life unexpectedly intrudes in the worst possible way: his kidneys are failing. Photographotter, another member, agrees to donate his kidney and fly from New York to Stockholm to save Hiyu’s life. Whereas We Met in Virtual Reality was filmed entirely within VRChat, The Reality of Hope alternates between real and virtual environments, reminding us that there are actual people behind the cartoon animals we initially see as our subjects. It’s a touching reminder of the power of community, and a great documentary for the gaming crowd. The use of video game assets in documentaries has been a bit of a trend recently that I have been fascinated with, and I hope it continues, especially if we get more films such as this. I also suspect it’ll be streaming in the near future as Documentary+ was listed as one of the companies involved, so hopefully you’ll get to check it out for yourself.

The other animated selections were Flower Show, Inkwo For When the Starving Return, Luz Diabla, Field Recording, Jesus 2, The Eating of an Orange, and A Round of Applause for Death.

David Redmon is the exact kind of cinephile who would make a movie like Kim’s Video, perhaps the most stranger-than-fiction documentary about film in recent memory. He not only loves movies, but takes every opportunity to apply them to his own life. Maybe a bit too much. Okay, definitely too much, but that’s beside the point. A lovingly scrappy ode to what cinema means to people, it tells the tale of perhaps the most famous video store in New York City, a story whose beginning and end are readily available but whose middle part will likely shock you (and also raise the eyebrows of more than a few documentary ethics people, but again, that’s besides the point). I understand why most people would ask why they should watch a feature-length documentary on the closure of a video store, especially with this opening. I didn’t need a reason, but I got one anyway, because beneath the niche subject matter, DIY aesthetic and overuse of film references lies a tragic fable of what happens when the value of film as art is diminished.

For a generation of cinephiles in NYC’s East Village, Kim’s Video was the place to be. Started by 21-year-old Korean Immigrant Yong-man Kim, it carried the kinds of movies you couldn’t find at Blockbuster. This is partially because they weren’t mainstream, but occasionally because those stores played by the rules. Kim’s was no ordinary video store. It was a radical place that stocked bootlegs of unavailable cult and art movies and put film education over profit. The stories were legendary. FBI raids. A cease-and-desist from Jean-Luc Godard. Outstanding late fees from the Coen Brothers.

Kim’s later became a chain, but as times changed, the stores closed, and eventually the original store, with its 55,000 film library, was no more. As for the rare movies contained within, Kim issued a challenge to take up the collection, a challenge eventually won by the small Italian village of Salemi. In the end, all of Kim’s collection was sent there, with the promise that it would be digitized and former Kim’s members could access the collection for free. One of these members was David Redmon, who travels to Salemi years later. English speakers are in short supply, the location is closed and, to his horror, the collection poorly maintained. As the story of what happened to Kim’s Video begins to unravel, David looks for a way to save the collection with the help of the movies that inspired him.

While many may come for the subject matter of the film and the insane story contained within (which I will not spoil here), I will admit this movie will be a hard sell to many. Even by my standards, the amount of film references became a bit much, and the ending of the film, while cathartic, will also raise a lot of ethical questions. However, I find the real story here is more important and relevant than ever. In an era where Hollywood can make their libraries disappear in an age of streaming, making illegal distribution the only option for access in some cases, and physical media seems to be making a comeback, Kim’s Video presents itself as a devastating story of the effects of cinema being seen more as a commodity than art. When I saw this at Sundance, it felt incredibly urgent.

Those nostalgic for an age of finding hidden gems of weirdo movies at their local video store, or interested in a bygone slice of NYC counterculture will find a lot to love about Kim’s Video. It’s a genre-defying work of documentary that I felt made up for its flaws with insane subject matter and a punk-rock sense of playfulness. I strongly recommend this to any remotely offbeat film buffs.