‘Endless Cookie’ Review: A Wild Animated Documentary About Family, Identity, and Storytelling
A filmmaker sets out to capture his half-brother’s storytelling, only for the project to spiral into a chaotic, animated exploration of family, identity, and Indigenous life.
From the rich tradition of Canadian adult animation comes an inventive, intense, and strikingly original hybrid of documentary and animated film titled Endless Cookie. Calling it an “animated documentary” might be stretching things a bit—but not by much. Beneath its deliberately scrappy, offbeat visual style, the film by brothers Seth Scriver and Pete Scriver is, at its core, a family story told through their own voices and those of everyone orbiting them.
The film unfolds as the story of its own making, beginning with Seth pitching a Canadian arts fund to direct an animated feature. His idea is to center the film on his half-brother Pete, an Indigenous man living in the remote northern community of Shamattawa, in the province of Manitoba. The hook, according to Seth—who is white and based in Toronto—is simple: Pete is the greatest storyteller he knows, and his endless flow of anecdotes should drive the entire film.
That premise quickly becomes a gateway into something broader and stranger: a sprawling, often chaotic family saga that doubles as an immersion into the world of Canada’s First Nations communities, where much of the extended family lives. Along the way, the film traces the brothers’ shared and separate histories, shaped by radically different lived experiences within the same country—one white, the other Indigenous.
All of this might sound relatively conventional, even familiar within the realm of personal documentaries, if not for how it’s told. Endless Cookie is a handmade animated film that feels almost aggressively creative—loose, scattered, and driven by a near-radical intensity in its pacing, editing, narrative structure, and sheer volume of characters. Seth and Pete appear as “human” figures, but most of their relatives are rendered as combs, cookies, onions, peanuts, or whatever else the film’s imagination conjures up.
The storytelling constantly veers off in unexpected directions, shaped by Pete’s digressive tales, the chaotic, overlapping conversations between the brothers (a kind of sonic cacophony that’s as frustrating for Seth—who’s trying to record everything—as it is for the audience), and the fluid interplay between past and present. Gradually, a portrait emerges of life on the reservation—one that occasionally echoes the tone and texture of Reservation Dogs.
Rather than adopting the solemn, heavy tone common in other films that also deal with dispossession, systemic abuse, and the historical trauma inflicted on Indigenous peoples, Endless Cookie takes a very different route. It’s funny, irreverent, bizarre, and at times almost psychedelic, building a universe that springs directly from Pete’s stories. The pitch Seth makes to secure funding—supposedly to be completed in seven months but stretching into years—is to create something “fun, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true.” For the most part, the film delivers on that ambitious promise.
That said, it can also be exhausting. Its relentless pace, barrage of sound effects (at times resembling an ’80s video game), deliberate repetition of phrases, and constant shifts between timelines and anecdotes can become overwhelming. When the Scrivers slow things down—leaning into more melancholic, poetic, or politically reflective moments, often aligned with an indie animation sensibility—the film becomes sharper and more resonant. When it pushes too hard for humor, it risks turning repetitive.
Even so, Endless Cookie stands as a welcome surprise: one of the most original animated films—and one of the most distinctive documentaries—in recent years.
