‘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 basis for this idiosyncratic and affectionate animated documentary. The aim was to create something “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true”. The Scriver brothers succeed in pretty much all of this and, with the film’s quirky, psychedelic style of computer animation, create something genuinely unexpected and visually playful. It is a picture infused with love – both for family, and for the creative act (the film took nearly a decade to complete). It is also a generous invitation into the heart of a sprawling extended family from Toronto-based Seth Scriver and his older brother Peter, who lives in Shamattawa, a First Nations reserve in northern Manitoba. 

 Intimate, funny and colourful 

This is the second animated feature from Seth Scriver following Asphalt Watches (2013), co-directed with Shayne Ehman and which won best Canadian first feature film at Toronto before playing in Annecy and other festivals. Endless Cookie, which premiered at Sundance, has won several prizes including Annecy’s Contrechamp grand prix and the Film Forward Golden Alexander at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. Further festival slots seem likely and, while adult-themed animation is traditionally a tough sell theatrically, the picture could continue its journey through a Hundreds Of Beavers-style bespoke repertory strategy or via a streaming platform release. 

The film opens with Seth receiving an ’Explore and Create’ award from a (slightly fictionalised) Canadian film body, which gives him the go-ahead to pursue the title that will eventually become Endless Cookie. The film-body representative (depicted as a grey, L-square ruler, one of the few emphatically straight lines in the picture) struggles to grasp the project that is proposed by Seth (enormous round face, tiny red hat, hoodie and a green, gherkin-shaped nose).

There is a running joke throughout the picture, which sees Seth pleading repeatedly for a deadline extension and attempting to justify some of the more outlandish scenes, like a conversational segue into the history of ’Pure Finders’, Victorian dog-poo collectors who sold their wares to the leather tanning industry. In addition to everything else, Endless Cookie casts an ironic eye over the filmmaking process itself, exploring the struggles of making an entirely animated film in a remote location (there is no direct road to Shamattawa) using audio that is constantly interrupted by children, family members or one of Peter’s numerous dogs. 

Far from ruining the integrity of a scene, these interruptions are woven into the fabric of the film and explored by Seth’s creatively bizarre animated interpretations. The distractions, the sound of a toilet flushing, the electronic noise machine that Peter’s daughter plays with constantly, the muffled squeaks of a litter of puppies under the stairs: all of this is what imbues Endless Cookie with its considerable warmth and amiable charm. 

Peter, according to his younger brother, is “one of the best storytellers I know”. And so it proves, in this film that also time-travels to Toronto in the 1970s and ’80s, dipping into Peter’s tequila-and-punk period, then pinballs into an imagined future in which Seth is still labouring over the film. Peter’s stories are meandering and digressive – it takes almost the entire running time of the film for him to reach the end of a tale about getting his hand caught in a bear trap. But while Peter’s stories may not always have a clear destination, the journey that the brothers invite us on is intimate, funny and colourful (in every sense of the word).