Movie Review: My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Dash Shaw.

Written by: Dash Shaw.

Starring: Jason Schwartzman (Dash), Lena Dunham (Mary), Reggie Watts (Assaf), Maya Rudolph (Verti), Susan Sarandon (Lunch Lady Lorraine), Thomas Jay Ryan (Principal Grimm), Alex Karpovsky (Drake), Louisa Krause (Gretchen), John Cameron Mitchell (Brent Daniels), Matthew Maher (Senior Kyle), Keith Poulson (Senior Craig).

 

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea takes a lot of influences – both in terms of its visual look and its storytelling, combines them all together to make an animated film that can sometimes feel patchwork, but it’s always interesting to look at, and entertaining. The film runs a brisk 75 minutes, so there’s not much time to get bored, and while that means the characters are thinly written, the story moves quick enough to keep things from getting bogged down. It’s not a great animated film, but it’s a great first animated film for Writer/director Dash Shaw – a graphic novelist making his transition into the movies. He plays it safe in many ways, just working on making sure everything works. I hope a second film from him will take more chances.

 

The film centers on a high school sophomore named Dash (presumably based on the writer/director, but voiced by Jason Schwartzman in a way that makes him seem like if Max Fischer was animated) – who on the first day of school has a fight with his best (only) friend Assaf (Reggie Watts) because the editor of the school paper, Verti (Maya Rudolph) clearly favors Assaf in more than one way. On a quest to get his permanent record, Dash ends up in the bowels of the school, where he comes across paper work that shows that the school new auditorium – built at the top of the school – has made the whole building dangerously unstable, and that even a small earthquake could send the school off a cliff, and crashing into the ocean. Of course, no one listens to Dash, and of course, that is precisely what happens. Dash has to team up with Assaf, Verti, sophomore class President Mary (Lena Dunham) and a helpful lunch lady (Susan Sarandon) to try and reach the top of the school so they can be rescued, before the whole school sinks.

 

The film is basically what you get if you animated a mishmash of John Hughes and The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno). The animation style is often rudimentary on the surface – the characters aren’t Don Hertzfeldt stick figures by any means, but they aren’t overly detailed either. Shaw does excel in the backgrounds however – often creating intense, flashing room that leave our heroes in striking silhouette. His other influences ranger from old school Nintendo games – the ones where a character stutters across the screen to fight bad guys, but only have one move, to a deliberate reference to A Charlie Brown Christmas. The result is actually quite charming – as if a high school sophomore’s doodle book came to life along with his fantasies of the school being destroyed, and all his enemies being vanquished.

 

I liked the vocal work in the movie as well – even if, for the most part, Shaw seemed to cast people to do things right in the centre of their sweet spot. Still, it works – and the film does as a whole as well. It’s fun and funny, and just as you start to feel the film flagging a little bit, it’s over. I look forward to seeing what Shaw does next – he’s made a very good first film, but I think there’s something more waiting to come out.