My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (2016)
IMDB Rating : 6.1/10 (as on 08.05.2017)
PG-13 | 1h 15min | Animation, Comedy, Drama
An earthquake causes a high school to float into the sea,
where it slowly sinks like a shipwreck.
Director: Dash Shaw
Writer: Dash Shaw
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Lena Dunham, Reggie Watts
Movie rating ★★✬☆☆
Gary Thompson
The title "My Entire High
School Sinking Into the Sea" is its own spoiler, so don't blame me. In
making his animated feature debut, Dash Shaw adapts his own graphic novel about
a group of high school sophomores scrambling to survive two catastrophes — their
high school literally submerging, and just plain high school.
It's hard to say which is more
difficult. On the day an earthquake sends his seaside school into the ocean,
Dash (Jason Schwartzman) is already having a tough one. His best friend Assag
(Reggie Watts) is about to commence a romance with Verti (Maya Rudolph), who
happens to be his only other friend.
His selfish jealousy makes
things difficult for all of them, not to mention the viewer. Dash isn't
selfish/funny, the way Schwartzman's character was in the Wes Anderson high
school classic "Rushmore." Just selfish.
Things improve a bit when the
school slides into the storm-tossed ocean, and director Shaw is able to tack
his quips and gags on to the frame of a disaster movie. In fact, the movie
borrows basic story points from "The Poseidon Adventure" — as the
school floods from the bottom up (freshman and sophomores first) Dash, his pals
and a motley band survivors make for the upper floors of the school, then the
roof, hoping for a rescue.
This casts high school as a
surreal, ghoulish and often snarky game of attrition — here, survival of the
flippest. The movie isn't Pixar, and the animation is at times intentionally
crude, but there are interesting touches as well — grasping, inky tendrils of
color, psychedelic patterns, some other clever visual ideas.
I detected a few nods to
Charles M. Schulz and the Peanuts gang — the way the eyes are animated, the way
the characters dance over the closing credits. Maybe Shaw is aiming to update
Schulz for a modern, hipper, slightly older crowd (can you be too old for
Peanuts?).
But his movie is mostly
attitude, and stretched to feature length (even an efficient 75 minutes) begins
to feel thin. Dash self-narrates his adventure, and there is comic irony in the
way he describes himself as the hero, though we notice it's the other
characters doing the decisive work.
The occasional pleasures of
"My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea" are to be found on the
periphery — Susan Sarandon is the voice of Lorraine the Lunch Lady, who becomes
more interesting as the movie evolves, reversing the dramatic arc of Dash
himself.
Read full review at Chicago tribune
Movie rating ★★★☆
Laughs amid the waves
Michael O'Sullivan
The plot of “My Entire High
School Sinking Into the Sea,” the feature debut of indie comics artist and
writer Dash Shaw, is pretty well encapsulated in the title. Set inside the
four-story building that is the home of Tides High, the crudely animated yet
cleverly written comedy focuses on five characters struggling to save
themselves when a cliff gives way beneath that structure, which plunges intact
into the ocean.
Wry sense of knowing detachment
pervades “My Entire High School,” which is part disaster film and part satire —
of high school’s dramas of popularity and relationship status and of the many
movies that have been made about those things.
Although distributed by Gkids,
this PG-13 film isn’t exactly for little children. Truly cool high-schoolers —
meaning the freaks, geeks and misfits — will appreciate its sardonic nihilism,
as will more grown-up audiences, happy to be looking back on their own memories
of high school’s life-or-death matters, instead of living them.
“My Entire High School” has an
unpretentiously trippy animation style, combining psychedelic backgrounds with
the kind of characters you’d expect to find on the back of some art student’s
spiral notebook. It’s crazy and ridiculous at times. But I can’t help agreeing
with Assaf, who observes, of his companions’ rescue plans, “I like it. It has
the logic of a dream.”
Read full review at Washington Post
Angst, Jealousy and ‘My Entire High School Sinking Into the
Sea
GLENN KENNY
Hot on the heels of “The Death
of Louis XIV” comes another candidate for Most Accurately Titled Film of 2017.
Tenderhearted readers, fear not; this is neither a documentary nor a
live-action depiction. “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea,” written
and directed by Dash Shaw, is an eccentric and lively animated fantasy.
The movie’s flat animation
style — Jane Samborski is the lead animator — and purposefully crude character
depictions are initially deceptive. (Its personages look as if they’ve been
drawn with a Sharpie, in a style reminiscent of Charles M. Schulz and Gary
Panter.) As the picture continues, its brightly colored visuals grow ever more
psychedelic and phantasmagoric. This makes the mode of narrative and humor —
which I’ll call strained, half-curdled, self-regarding millennial whimsy — go
down a little easier. The voice work, from a cast that also includes Jason
Schwartzman and Lena Dunham, is very good, though not unexpected.
Read full review at The New York times
Movie rating ★★★☆☆
Animated disaster movie smartly captures teenage
life
Benjamin Lee
Given that the majority of us
have experienced the scattered highs and crushing lows of school life, it’s
always easy to spot an on-screen representation that doesn’t feel authentic.
With the boom in teen movies during the late 90s, too many felt as if they
represented a narrative that was impossible to relate to and existed purely in
the foggy mind of a 40-year-old ex-jock screenwriter.
So when a piece of film or
television comes close to accurately reflecting what being a teenager was really
like, it’s something quite special. In this strange new animated film,
writer-director Dash Shaw has made a curious combination of Freaks and Geeks
and The Poseidon Adventure as an unconventional method of recounting parts of
his high school experience on screen. Oh, and it’s animated.
Even if it didn’t quite work
out, graphic novel artist Shaw would deserve an A for effort for trying
something totally unique with his first feature. Combining a disaster movie
with a high school comedy while also animating it is a rather ambitious
combination. What’s even more incredible is just how well it all works. His
film looks like no other: an eye-popping combination of colours, effects and
carefully hand-drawn figures that evolves strangely and beautifully as the
story veers into chaos.
But what’s truly important about
the film is that despite the hipster trappings (the voice cast also includes
Lena Dunham and fellow Girls star Alex Karpovsky), the dialogue remains sharp
and the social hierarchy relatable. Dash is filled with the arrogance of youth,
making Schwartzman the perfect voice match, and the balance of power between
students and their seniors is well-pitched before being thrown up into the air
during the quake. There are some smart ideas at play, such as the jock being
given a throne in the “new world” and an air pocket plan that allows for an
interesting recurring visual. The film also works as a convincing example of
the disaster movie genre with Susan Sarandon’s oddly affecting Lunch Lady
Lorraine joining the gang as a gruff, reluctant leader.
At a tight 72 minutes, the film
is a quick and dazzling burst of pleasure, pulling together so many opposing
visuals, ideas and genres and coming up with something entirely unique as a
result.
Read full review at The Guardian
Movie rating ★★✬☆☆
Amid apocalypse, cliques hold firm in ‘My Entire
High School Sinking Into the Sea’
Ty Burr
People exorcise their high
school years in various ways. Some exact revenge against lunchroom bullies in
novels or films, others create TV series in which hapless teenage heroes
develop superpowers or battle vampires. Dash Shaw’s “My Entire High School Sinking
Into the Sea” just throws the whole building off a cliff. It opens Saturday at
the Museum of Fine Arts.
The movie, animated with
homemade gusto and featuring a hipster’s roster of a vocal cast, should win
some kind of truth-in-advertising award. Tides High School, built with no
discernible logic on a sheer drop-off atop a major seismic fault line, does
indeed pitch into the sea early in the going, whereupon “My Entire High School”
turns into a Cartoon Network version of a John Hughes remake of “The Poseidon
Adventure.”
At the center of the survival
tactics and life lessons is a misfit hero named Dash, just like the film’s
writer-director, in case you weren’t sure whether there were personal issues
being worked out here.
Even amid apocalypse, high
school cliques hold firm. There’s a bad-boy druggie (Alex Karpovsky of
“Girls”), a cruelly god-like senior (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch” playwright
John Cameron Mitchell), and a Little Miss Popular (“Girls” creator Lena Dunham)
who may end up being the most levelheaded person in the whole movie. Scratch
that: The character with the most surprises up her sleeve is Lunch Lady
Lorraine, whom Susan Sarandon embodies with the gravelly gravitas of a
soup-stained Yoda.
That’s a heck of a cast, and
Shaw’s animation is a loopy, inventive mish-mosh of elements: thick pen
outlines, fine etching work, washes of finger-painted color, and the occasional
outbreak of full-on psychedelia. With all that raging creativity on display,
why does “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” ultimately feel smaller
than it should? Maybe because its maker is intent on settling old scores,
sometimes literally — the film’s soundtrack, composed by Rani Sharone, at times
parodies the Mickey Mousing techniques of Saturday morning cartoon music.
According to the closing
credits, “My Entire High School” was six years in the making and is clearly
something that Shaw felt he had to get out of his system with his feature
film-directing debut. Mission accomplished, and very stylishly, too.
Read full review at Boston Globe
High school can be a brutal
time for the teenage outsider, with moments of terror that can feel like being
caught in an earthquake, burnt alive, drowning or swimming in a pool of sharks.
All those factors are represented literally in graphic novelist Dash Shaw's
first animated feature, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, a sweetly
subversive dig at the constricting codes of teen hierarchies, the sheep-like
mentality of youth and the failures of the education system. Loaded with a name
voice cast often playing amusingly against type, this droll toon comedy should
provide kicks especially for hipsters whose high school years are still vividly
imprinted recent memories.
Aided by Lunch Lady Lorraine
(Susan Sarandon), a kind of badass ninja spirit guide for defenseless teens,
Dash becomes Gene Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure, leading a small group of
followers — the post-rapprochement Assaf and Verti, as well as convert Mary —
upwards through the sinking wreckage to the senior school floor and the promise
of safety. En route, each of them gets to prove his or her mettle as they
encounter druggy slacker Drake (Alex Karpovsky) and his posse, guilt-stricken
Principal Grimm (Thomas Jay Ryan) and jock superstar Brent Daniels (John
Cameron Mitchell), enthroned school royalty revealed to be a dim-wit A-hole.
Read full review at Hollywood Reporter
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