Signs of Life

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Dat Git Was a Rubber Band

The Endless Cookie is a cookie that never ends. This can be one of the greatest cinematic experiences one ever had, or a still ongoing paralysis — the still sleepy victim next to me, struggling to open their eyes, asking: what the hell was the narrative? What was this all about? Was this really a documentary? Yet I also saw tears of joy that reminded me of young mothers looking at their newborns.

The grown-man but still childlike epistemological extrapolation regarding cartoonish anthropomorphism was my track for why animators might love it. But let me row back a bit before I try to squeeze too much information in clunky overgrown sequences of words. I was also just waking up from a dream like situation. And this is more like a personal document of experiencing an animation festival and experiencing Endless Cookie rather than a thought out thesis or review.

The next morning, in the hotel breakfast zone — that confessional where festival guests assemble like badly rendered ghosts over hard bread and coffee machine sludge — included moments of pondering, where to sit and eat, alone, joining someone, waiting for someone else to join. When a young filmmaker – who herself had her personal identity and experience screened as a short movie – dared to join me and had her final coffee I had a small opportunity to traumashare with one possible victim the night before. As I saw her still asleep on her seat when leaving the screening after the credits ended.

She was still trying to wake up and reorder spiritually/mentally when I just plainly asked her how she liked the movie. “It’s cool what they (*) tried to do,.. but it was too long.”

There it was again. The little axe.

Too long.

It’s funny: the “short movies becoming too long” statement itself has been circulating now for a long time in ongoing debates of animation / festival circles. Forgone are the times where a shot of a car in Zabriskie Point lasts for eons — just because the acid-fuelled mind of director and team couldn’t get enough of the front window’s magical reflection of past rushing billboards, and audiences just able to appreciate these visuals (or appreciate the film maker's obsession).

Movies being too long is a frequent complaint these days. Days of contestation of/for attention — be it the everyday battle between viewer and viewed one, between consumer's intent and the algorithm based on consumer’s actual consumption, between content makers of different fields; be it between to-be-defined slop and to-be-defined high quality or quantity; or between content and human.

But even experimental film spaces, those noble non-turbo-commercial zones where everyone claims to resist the market while filling out forms designed by the market’s depressed cousin, now speak the language of pragmatic trimming. We cannot show everything. There are too many films. Too many animators. Too many new people. Too many works. Too many minutes. Too many cookies. Cookies that take too long to chew.

So naturally curators state that hundreds of movies couldn’t be shown simply due to an amount of too many films in general — so basically we gotta stick with the established ones, with established rhythms — generally viewing the growing amount of new animators as a pragmatic problematic issue.

And yet what they fail to see is that today the real field of competition has moved on and away from the cinema, from the controlled art spaces — white cube was a joke once taken seriously enough — or from TV, and ended up within the individual everyday and every moment, and can’t be turned down.

And seeing, reading, and experiencing this pragmatic debate about length — and seeing, watching, and experiencing the inner battlefield of attention spam, or even more dear: lengthy thoughtfulness — I’d tend to believe that part of the excitement for some Cookie lovers lies in this pragmatic belief in time.

Experiencing the work behind the creation of animation — beginning in early days with a basic fascination for likely simple drawings, and then growing into a lifelong experience of ecstatic moments witnessing and grasping drawings turn into movement (**) — seeing a movie like Endless Cookie taking its time in creation and in action offers a contemporary kind of satisfaction to creators who likely struggle with the pragmatism of these doomscroll times.

Doomscroll versus the remaining little animal in us that once knew how to stare at a wall and hallucinate meaning.

Someone could and took the space, and was able to value it.

It’s a good shadow of a flame.

But what is the space or time? A couple of paragraphs in, and I didn’t even begin to talk about the content of the movie, a movie that is circulating in the fields of documentary movies. So it shouldn’t be too difficult to synopsize these ninety-something minutes that can easily feel like two hours +. But it actually is, in a sense.

See, one could summarize on a basic level: Endless Cookie is a self-documenting documentary about trying to document a relative’s life.

Or as the character in the movie himself describes: the goal is to make something funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true.

You are not satisfied. I’m not satisfied.

For me it was certainly an experience that went beyond the screen. When Kuny/Seth tries to interview his brother always something happens that steals attention. Most times it's one of the children making noises (playing playstation, flushing a toilet, or saying”Hey guys I just had a dream I have to tell you before I forget”) as the festival's audience was filled with children at every screening.. including babies making baby sounds during the screening. And the movie just celebrates these shifts of attention in a slow and selfless way.

What I also did not yet really go deep into is anthropomorphism in animation itself. The movie portrays Canadian Indigenous people and people in general in a refreshing way and doesn't fall into stereotypes. Instead it's way more elastic, specific, ridiculous and tender - always focusing on representing an individual. One of Peter's gits is drawn as a rubber band. Their cutest dog a peanut. Kuny and Peter themselves probably the characters at most resembling stereotypical human-looking characters amid a collection of wildly unorthodox and lovely creatures. These are not mouses or dogs or basic cartoon simplification but one step further. And this itself is exciting to watch. And that stylisation does not reduce them. It somehow gives them more room. When Kuny and Peter start to share some family photographs they use real photographs and it just becomes clear that this is a portrayal of dear ones. And a case of an animator portraying eotional realities (***).

Maybe this is where the length matters again. Not as indulgence, not as failure to trim, not even as bravery. More like a refusal to let the individual become a digestible unit.

The synopsis is not satisfying because the film does not want to become a synopsis. The rubber band keeps stretching: from person to creature, from documentary to cartoon, from family memory to festival exhaustion, from attention spam to lengthy thoughtfulness. Maybe the cookie never ends because the individual never becomes finished enough to consume.

It takes too long to chew.

But maybe chewing was the point.

You can watch Endless Cookie yourself now at MUBI