Endless Cookie: Whimsy and Reality Mix in a Near-Hallucinatory Animated Story of an Indigenous Storyteller

By Liz Braun

Rating: B+

Where to begin with the delightful chaos of Endless Cookie? 

Both hilarious and heartbreaking, this animated family album is a jam-packed visual memoir from half-brothers Seth and Peter Scriver — Seth is White, and Peter is Indigenous. 

The storytelling spans many years and all the miles between Toronto and the First Nations Reserve in Shamattawa, Manitoba. What began as a way to capture Peter’s ability to spin a yarn — “You’re one of the best storytellers I know,” Seth tells his brother — becomes a rambling homage to family and an inside look at Indigenous life in the far North.

Endless Cookie starts with its own birth: confirmation from a government body that funding is available to make a documentary. Seth has proposed to capture a half-dozen of Peter’s outlandish tales on film. And with funding in place, he is happy to tell his brother he’s coming to visit to do just that. The animated action then moves north to the remote settlement where Peter lives. 

Access is by plane only — no roads.

Next thing you know, Peter is telling the story of the day he got his hand caught in an animal trap — but hang on, filming has to stop because all Peter’s kids are making so much noise. Somebody has flushed the toilet, and there’s a pack of puppies making puppy noises under the front porch.

Peter is a single dad with nine kids and 16 — give or take — dogs, so there is always something going on to interrupt the filming process. The men give up and incorporate the audio chaos and every other kind of chaos into the storytelling.

What’s obvious early on is that even though the tales told meander and rarely toe any kind of recognizable narrative line, Peter is indeed a master storyteller. There are dangerous female sasquatches to discuss, bloody crime scenes to describe (even if they are just caribou food prep incidents) and that one time Rusty Redhead had an owl cling to his arm and refuse to leave.

The story of Peter’s hand caught in a trap recurs a few times. Then there are other, less amusing anecdotes and distressing incidents — how Rusty Redhead was kidnapped from his family and taken to a residential school, how grocery shopping works (and what it costs) when there’s only one store in town, those drinking water advisories, the way the RCMP treat local Indigenous residents.

The animation that brings Endless Cookie to life defies description, but let’s start with scrappy, gnarly, vaguely hallucinogenic. People have vegetables for heads and almost everyone has a strange nose, whether that nose is a mushroom, a phallic symbol or a floppy balloon.

Peter’s kids (and other people) are animated as objects and creatures that reflect their names and their personalities; you get a delightful glimpse of the real people in actual photos shown briefly at the movie’s end. 

Endless Cookie is a treasure. It’s a fantastic family story — you will fall in love with Peter’s creative offspring — but also a disheartening look at the realities of Indigenous life in Canada. The movie was a hit at Sundance and at Hot Docs 2025, where it won the Audience Award.

Endless Cookie: Written and directed by Peter Scriver and Seth Scriver, with the voices of Peter, Seth, Kristin, Simone, Dezray, Sterling, Antonio, Ada et al Scriver.  In theatres June 13 in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Guelph and Montreal.