SLIFF 2017 Review – MY ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL SINKING INTO THE SEA

MY ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL SINKING INTO THE SEA screens Saturday, November 4th at 8:00pm at .ZACK (3224 Locust St.) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Ticket information can be found HERE. It will also screen Thursday, November 8th at 7:30pm at .ZACK. Ticket information for that screening can be found HERE.

From acclaimed graphic novelist Dash Shaw (“Bottomless Belly Button,” “Cosplayers”) comes an audacious debut that is equal parts disaster cinema, high-school comedy, and blockbuster satire, told through a dream-like mixed-media animation style that incorporates drawings, paintings, and collage. Dash (Jason Schwartzman) and his best friend Assaf (Reggie Watts) are preparing for another year at Tides High School, where they muckrake on behalf of their widely distributed but little-read school newspaper, edited by their friend Verti (Maya Rudolph). But just when a blossoming relationship between Assaf and Verti threatens to destroy the boys’ friendship, Dash learns of an administration cover-up that puts all the students in danger. As disaster erupts and the friends race to escape through the roof of the school, they are joined by a popular know-it-all (Lena Dunham) and a lunch lady (Susan Sarandon) who is much more than meets the eye. Hailed as “the most original animated film of the year” and “John Hughes for the Adult Swim generation” by Indiewire, the film reminds audience members that the high-school experience — with its everyday concerns of friendships, cliques, and young love — continues to shape who we become, even in the most unusual of circumstances.

Review of MY ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL SINKING INTO THE SEA by Stephen Tronicek

Animation is a format that can capture a sense of expressionism just by existing because the language of animation automatically doesn’t have to, and actively benefits from not having mechanics like the real world. The background of an animated film representing the setting can be warped in a way, much more malleable than one of live action. That’s not to say that live action doesn’t do this too (look back at The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or some of the dollhouse work of Wes Anderson),  but often animation has the ability to represent these concepts just by being really weird and surreal in the visual text of the film rather than having to do so in the aspects such as sound effects and visual cues still based largely in a real world. That’s where My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea really benefits. This is a psychedelic experience and a dark one at that, but it is also one that could also only exist within the world of animation and in being so, transcends into a heartache of a film.

The title of the film is quite apt, with the film being about Dash Shaw and his friends escaping their high school, which has literally collapsed fully formed into the coastal waters off of California. As the high school floods, the trauma of the experience is shown through surreal and terrifying imagery that gets even trippier as the film continues. The body count also racks itself up. The imagery of the high school, the awkwardness in every frame is established early in the film, fueling our sympathy for the teenagers, so when they start dying in mass numbers, the dread of their deaths complimented by the stroboscopic animation of the film, the audience is drenched in a feeling of sickening fear. It is a great use of animation.

As mentioned before, the film would also only work in the contexts of animation too. That’s where the animation is REALLY necessary. As the plot progresses, more and more elaborate and exaggerated events and interpretations of characters start to crop up that outside of the format of animation would land with a thud. Here they are only accentuated by the bright, scary colors of the film and cut into an emotion that is fearfully honest. You walk away traumatized by the experience, as you should be, and eventually leave the theatre understanding what it would be like to be stuck inside your entire high school sinking into the sea.