by Rollin Bishop

It is impossible to succinctly describe Endless Cookie, the animated documentary from half-brothers Peter and Seth Scriver. It's a singular, often-absurdist meandering through hand-drawn stories as told by Peter and first recorded and then animated by Seth. It's about the bond they share, the bonds they don't: they share a father, but Peter's mother was Indigenous and Seth's was white. And also the bond of just… trying to get this film made in the first place, over the course of nearly a decade.

If there's a true narrative throughline here, it's that Endless Cookie takes so long to actually come together. The result is that what began as a look back at Peter's stories from the past, instead becomes a chronicle of Peter and Seth's family more generally. "I was inspired to record my brother Pete’s stories," Seth said in an interview earlier this year ahead of the film's Sundance premiere. "He’s one of the greatest storytellers, and in the end, it turned into a type of family portrait."

The stories that Seth seemingly intended to capture initially weave in and out with a varying level of relevance (and for differing definitions of relevant). Peter's family helps spin all of them out beyond the intended trajectory by simply existing. Seth's recordings are maddeningly chaotic, full of interjections, and only rarely manage to go directly from point A to point B.

In one particularly memorable example, Peter gets his hand caught in a trap which he himself had set, but it's told in pieces over the course of the movie about four or five times because he keeps getting interrupted. Other stories start and finish, or at least start, before Peter eventually gets around to saying something like, "Anyway, so about that trap I set." Importantly, it's pretty clear Peter still has an animated nub of a hand whenever he's telling the story, so, you know, spoilers.

"There's seven kids living in Pete's house and he's got 12 dogs," Seth said as part of a CBC interview. "We literally got interrupted one million times. And then it was kind of just like, 'I think we have to just go with what is real.'"

The one truly cohesive thread and thematic touchstone is the clear anger at the Canadian government's ill treatment of its Indigenous population. Peter and his family are part of the Shamattawa First Nation, which Seth can only reach by plane, and that's a foundation for everything else that Endless Cookie explores. The lived experiences of simply existing there colors everything else, without ever being treated as lesser or wacky.

The jabs at Canada as an entity aren't exactly subtle; the whole impetus in the documentary for Seth to record Peter's stories is that they've been given a grant to do it, but every subsequent mention of this includes the person that gave said grant questioning what, exactly, the half-brothers have spent the money on. In one particularly memorable scene, the action of a story is interrupted to show Seth showing the animation to this government official, who is asking why the scene is so very long and what that adds to… well, anything. Meanwhile, a literal pile of money burns behind Seth as he goes on to explain.

There's also an entire segment that's one long Zero Wing meme recreation (SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB) that's pivoted to be about land instead of bases with the Canadian government as the villain, complete with maple leaf adornments. It's not even a reference to the game and its notorious English translation itself; Endless Cookie specifically riffs on the viral video and song that was popular back in the early aughts.

Which makes an odd sort of sense given that Endless Cookie's closest kin in my mind would be Flash animation from that same era. There's a roughness and grit that speaks to me — that says this was all the effort of an overworked, passionate person trying to do too much with software that's trying to buckle underneath. The kind of animation where you suspect you'd see actual literal fingerprint smudges on individual frames if you could zoom in enough. This feeling has only intensified after learning that Seth actually had begun animating Endless Cookie in Flash 8 before finally upgrading to Animate with a side of After Effects to finish it off.

To call Endless Cookie an unusual film is both probably a disservice and an understatement. Despite largely taking place in northern Manitoba, it exudes warmth. The extended family has their struggles, and Seth doesn't shy away from that for the sake of something more broadly palatable, but it just makes the kindness and compassion in spite of that all the more meaningful.

Endless Cookie opens today, December 5, theatrically in New York and Los Angeles and will release on VOD on December 16. It was previously released in Canada, and premiered earlier this year at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.