My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
Dir: Dash Shaw
2016
*****
I loved Dash Shaw’s 2006 graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button but I couldn’t see how his animation style could be adapted for the big screen. Shaw is one of those writers/artists that take make something simple and turn it into some big. Bottomless Belly Button is about as simple as it gets but the novel itself is the perfect example of what makes comic animation so special. I found it very inspiring, in fact I was so inspired by it I started releasing some small press stuff of my own but it was no where near as good as Shaw’s work – he makes it look effortless and easy when it really isn’t. His 2016 debut feature My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, seemingly came out of no where, I keep my eye to the ground when it comes to comics and I had no idea it was even in development. I expected something like Bottomless Belly Button but was overjoyed to find something else entirely. The style of animation won’t be to everyone’s taste, I didn’t like it at first but it grew on me while my wife hated it throughout. The surreal dream-like animation actually suited the surreal dream-like story rather well with the rather crude drawings mismatching the melodrama to form a wonderfully dry satire. I loved the dialogue and how it deals with huge social and theoretical issues as well as simple and unimportant stuff that preoccupies the minds of most teenagers. It is basically Titanic meets Mad Max meets The Breakfast Club, a disaster film dealing with high-school hierarchy. The dialogue is brilliant but it is nothing without the voice talents of Jason Schwartzman, Reggie Watts, Maya Rudolph, Lena Dunham and Susan Sarandon. Schwartzman’s character reminded me a lot of Max Fischer from Rushmore and it was wonderful to have him return to the genre. Watts, Rudolph and Dunham’s humour added the perfect element to their voice characters and Susan Sarandon was a very pleasant surprise in her role as Lunch Lady Lorraine. The story’s heroes are Dash (Schwartzman) and his best friend Assaf (Watts), who are both sophomores at Tides High School, a school located at a cliff edge above a fault line. The best friends write as a team for the school newspaper, edited by mutual friend Verti (Rudolph). But one day Verti assigns Assaf to write a story solo about the new auditorium opening in the top floor, and Dash clearly picks up a relationship forming between Assaf and Verti. Feeling angered and betrayed, Dash writes a hurtful article about Assaf that provokes Principal Grimm to put a mark on his permanent record. Dash breaks into the school archives to find his record, but discovers evidence that Grimm had forged the inspection report for the auditorium. He also runs into Mary (Dunham), a junior overachiever trying to find her confiscated cell phone. Dash tries to warn the rest of the students, but gets thrown into detention along with Mary for breaking into the archives, right when the auditorium opens causing the school to break off the cliff and fall into the ocean. Dash rescues Assaf and Verti from the sophomore level library, and Verti figures out that they can swim through the seawater by breathing trapped pockets of air. Dash nearly drowns, but is rescued by Lunch Lady Lorraine, while other students are eaten by sharks. At the junior level floor, the teachers are trying to bring surviving kids in line. It takes Lorraine to calm down a riot. She further shows her survival skills by saving Verti from a group of drug dealing students who have broken into the nurse’s office (although most kids just want cotton bubs for their ears – because everyone likes putting cotton buds in their ears). The trio plus Lorraine and Mary decide to make it to the roof, but no one else wants to follow them. At the senior level floor, they find Football captain Brent Daniels (John Cameron Mitchell) organizing a hostile cult around him. They then find Grimm, who admits to the forgery. Grimm points out that they can scale to the roof using the back of the auditorium bleachers, and then sacrifices his life to open the bleachers up. The five friends reach the roof just as rescue helicopters arrive. Lorraine rescues a handful of other students while some others escape using a makeshift raft. Dash and Assaf vow to write a book about the disaster. Many weeks later, the surviving students attend a party for the release of Dash and Assaf's book, "Our Entire High School Sinking into the Sea". Reviews of the book come out mixed to negative because of Dash's turgid prose. Lorraine notes to Dash that she has a new year's worth of students to feed and take care of, before leaving the party off the side of the building they’re in. The film ends with the surviving high-schoolers dancing through the end credits (even though hundreds of their fellow students have clearly died). It is high-school satire at its very best, while also taking a swipe at Hollywood and society in general. It is wry, dry and very charming. Shaw supposedly started the story as a graphic novel but when he realised that he could make gifs in Photoshop and line up images, and that Photoshop could arrange them in short animations, he realized that he didn't need a multi-pane camera, he could just use a scanner and make animations with the same tools he used to make comics. It is very effective, not for everyone, but for the story I think it worked perfectly. It is my favorite animation in years and certainly one of the more original.