Rooted In Toronto’s Kensington Market And Remote Shamattawa: Discover The Surreal Characters Of ‘Endless Cookie’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Endless Cookie is an impressionistic, animated documentary by half-brothers Seth and Peter Scriver that weaves together a vibrant collage of memories from their childhood in Toronto’s Kensington Market to Pete’s present life in the remote First Nation community of Shamattawa. The film will hit theaters this weekend, and be available on VOD starting December 16.

Worked on for more than eight years and already acclaimed on the festival circuit with wins at Annecy, Thessaloniki, and Hot Docs, the film blends surreal family recollections with reflections on creativity, craft, and storytelling, forming a deeply personal portrait of the Scriver family. This weekend’s theatrical release brings added buzz as Endless Cookie recently qualified for both Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature at the upcoming Oscars.

According to Seth Scriver, his drawing style’s evolution has been influenced by many factors over the years, “doodling with friends and making zines and doing graffiti with my community of creative people.” He credits other members of the Nog-a-Dog collection of Canadian psychedelic doodlers, including Marc Bell, Amy Lockhart, Marc Connery, Jeffro Halladay, Keith Jones, and Jonny Peterson.

Another major influence was time spent working with Shayne Ehman for almost a decade on Asphalt Watches, “early graffiti years with Soy Burger, Deth, Rock, the UNCrew, my mentor cartoonist Uncle Mike Constable, and growing up in a vibrant, character-filled, fresh food and used clothing market in downtown Toronto’s Kensington Market/Chinatown.”

More specifically, with this film, Seth explains, “While designing these Endless Cookie characters, often it was a work in progress, showing the family members and gauging their responses,” Seth tells us. “If people were laughing, then you knew you were on the right track. Often, it would be other family members laughing at the drawing of who it was depicting,” he adds-

According to Seth, some of the character designs hold deeper meaning, while others were drawn “lucidly in a stream-of-consciousness way and just felt right.” He says another way he knew he was getting it right was when his one-and-a-half-year-old Racco recognized some of the drawings. “He said, ‘There’s Uncle Pete, and there’s Chris, and there’s Papa!’”

“At that moment, I really felt like we were on the right track.”

Below, Seth talks us through some of his favorite characters in Endless Cookie, with his comments accompanied by development artwork.

PETE

Some of the characters change depending on whose perspective they were listening to and get altered by audio interruptions as well. Like when Pete had his hand stuck in his trap, and the kids are messing around with a balloon—it alters Peter’s nose dramatically and stays altered in those scenes from then on as a kind of deflated balloon. When Pete is talking about himself doing something, his character changes to a different version of himself, and when he’s talking about someone else, he turns to a more surreal potato-with-an-ear-plug-stuck-on-it version of himself. The idea behind this is that everyone has their own idea of themselves and what they look like, and others usually see them differently. Also, events and experiences change you, too, so trying to touch on that a little. For example, I remember doing a huge amount of mushrooms when I was younger and having a crazy journey on them dealing with all sorts of insane stuff like ghosts, having my eye lenses replaced with animated cartoon fractals of chromed Donald Ducks, and when I came back a couple days later I was hanging out with a good friend and he could tell I was different. You could say the same thing about traumatic things like Pete getting his hand stuck in his own trap and almost freezing to death out there in the bush. That kind of stuff changes you. Same with having kids, haha—having kids is the biggest trip.

DEZ

I love Dez’s character, which is basically an elastic that moves by rolling and folds itself to hold something or wave. The idea behind this was that Dez had mostly grown up downtown and was moving back to the reserve. I remembered being worried if she would fit in back up in Shamattawa. Because Shamattawa is a different culture and it’s a lot tougher than Toronto. When people say “What are you looking at?” or act tough and postulate in Toronto or in our neighborhood, it doesn’t usually amount to much, but in Shamattawa, it would be go time, and someone’s getting knocked out. So anyhow, Dez managed to get all mixed up in stuff while back up in Shamattawa and got in a fight with a tough big lady known as Big Balls and managed to knock them out—and now they’re buddies, you know, haha. Anyhow, I was so stoked by her ability to be elastic with adjusting back to Shamattawa life in so many ways and fitting in, and was proud of her, so she naturally just became an elastic, and when I told her about that idea, she was stoked and was like, “That’s me, yeah, that’s me!”

RUSTY RED HEAD

Rusty lived a wild and hard life and was an amazing drawer, sculptor, and character. He spent a lot of time in and out of jail and was kidnapped in the ’60s, scooped by the RCMP up here in Canada as a child of 7 yrs old or so and shipped off to a residential school and then moved all around North America from foster home to foster home until finally making it back to Shamattawa when he was 16 or 17, and the family didn’t even know where he had been taken to for all those years.
While recording audio off of him he was suffering from encephalitis and sounded like Marlon Brando from The Godfather, as Pete said, so we made him look like the Godfather with a tuxedo on when introducing him, and then his nose takes over telling his story, which is a type of red milk jug cap wearing a bow tie, which matches his nickname, Milk Jug, and matches his name Rusty RedHead, and the milk jug caps are red in Shamattawa so that’s how that all made sense, haha. His story in the animation involves befriending a snowy owl.

COOKIE

Cookie’s character was pretty obvious; she’s just a cookie, and when she turns sideways, she gets real thin like a real cookie would, haha. We made sure to add lots of chocolate chips, too. Cookie has a moment where she’s making her own sound effects to hopefully be used in the movie, and that was fun animating the sound effects mutating her cookie body.

ANTONIO AND CHRIS

Antonio’s character is funny ’cause he loves the Chicago Bulls and is always wearing that logo or jersey. We realized he kinda looked like the logo a tiny bit, so I just exaggerated those features and made his face look like the actual logo.

Chris’s character was based directly on one of his cosplay characters he had dressed up as years ago. And it matched the post-apocalyptic scene he wanted, so that’s how that character came about. I didn’t realize it until I was lip-syncing how great it is to have a mask over your face like old Spider-Man cartoons. What a great, cheap way to make mouth movement super easy!

STEWART

Stewart’s character—Stewart loves beads and is somewhat of an expert on them, so we made his nose resemble a Fimo bead or Venetian trade bead. When he’s telling a story about when he was younger, we made his nose bigger and longer, and this was a little joke because he had a bump removed from his nose in his later years, so we exaggerated that bump removal.

NUTTY

Nutty was one of Pete’s long-time favorite dogs and pack leader for a long time. We made him a Mr. Peanut dog, and that led us to making some gross peanut butter dog poo jokes.

THE NFG OFFICER

The NFG officer was a joke based on a carpenter square, like he’s literally a square. That was the fear—that once we got government funding for our project, we were going to be forced to make a terrible stiff animation, which wasn’t the case at all. It was kind of a terrifying thing to do, actually. We were all a little curious how the granting officers would react when seeing themselves being made fun of or using their actual critiques in the animation, but in the end, they loved it, and some actually really appreciated it.