Final Rating: 4.5/5
Endless Cookie, an animated doc, begins with a National Film Grant officer awarding director Seth Scriver a grant for his upcoming documentary before excitedly announcing “I’ll see you again in seven months when it’s complete!” Seth calls up his brother Pete and lays out his pitch to record seven stories that are “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true.”
The subsequent collection of anecdotes and metanarratives collected over nine years fits the pitch, but not always in the ways the audience – or even the filmmakers – initially expect. More than simply “seven stories,” Endless Cookie is an intimate chronicle of the entire history of a large family spread across Canada.
All the best stories come up organically. While Seth does occasionally prompt Pete, often the brothers will just be interrupted by something that gets one of them talking, only to progress into an interesting anecdote. One of the best stories in the film – recalling a time Pete got his hand stuck in a trap – is both the first to be started and the last to be finished, because Pete keeps getting interrupted and then moving on to something else.
When Seth initially reaches out to Pete, it’s because his brother is “the best storyteller he knows.” Quickly, however, it’s made clear that the entire family is made up of fantastic storytellers. Each of Pete’s children gets at least one devoted segment. Two of Pete’s daughters even assisted in animating their stories.
Seth and Pete call their father a few times during the film, and each time he gets distracted talking about something weird that happened to him recently. Their father has one of the funniest stories in the movie, claiming to have seen a portal to another world while out fishing, ending the story with “and it wasn’t the only time!” (It’s never mentioned again.)
The animation is unique, at first a bit off-putting but quickly endearing. The characters all have different, non-human designs, making them quickly recognizable and instantly identifiable at any point in the film. Seth’s style of animation reflects the chaotic nature of their family dynamic.
Endless Cookie is filled with in-jokes and visual gags – like a pile of burning money in the corner while Seth talks to his grant officer. The ambient television hosts just-realistic-enough parodies of cable shows, like “Canadian Idle,” in which the radio in an idling car announces prison statistics about indigenous populations before a talking car seat says “still worse in the States, though.”
The story of Endless Cookie isn’t just the anecdotes of Pete and his family, it’s the life that they live while Seth’s documenting. The slow days, the messy interactions, the in-between moments, and the process of even getting his brother to tell a story. The audio and visuals are rough, and often messy, but so are the lives of the Scrivers.
Endless Cookie stands out as a unique work of Canadiana, and a fascinating portrait of a family of storytellers.
Endless Cookie was seen during the 2025 Hot Docs film festival.
