Poor people don’t have time to make animations which look like Disney films. This isn’t a dig at any of the marvellous and varied selection of PIXAR and Disney animated motion pictures which have filled our lives since the first fully digitally animated feature Toy Story (1995, Dir. John Lasseter).  What it explains is just the fact that the work required to fully render an animated motion picture on the level of detail and quality of the highest quality animated films of today requires a small army of concept artists, graphic artists and digitally trained animators, alongside an entire team to keep them all running along. If time is money, then animation on that scale is notoriously and obscenely expensive.

My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea (2016, Dir. Dash Shaw) is removed from that world of animation. That does not mean it did not cost tremendous amounts of money to produce, or that the time put in by Dash Shaw and his team of cohorts is any less valuable than that of a different more well-funded studio. It merely is not a film that is interested in replicating that same aesthetic that is funded by the wealthiest of animation studios.

Good.

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My mum, when she briefly flicked her eyes onto the screen I was watching the film on, asked me why I was watching “a kid’s film” so late at night. Now I usually want to move straight onto the film and its contents but a brief digression is needed here. The history of animation, bar some outliers, has been almost exclusively wrapped up with entertaining children. Many reasons for this I imagine, the one I like to think of is the long history of illustrations in children’s books. Kids love pictures. But the very fact is, animation is starting to grow beyond that. Perhaps it has always been beyond that, but I think in the mainstream consciousness the boundaries of who can and can’t watch “cartoons” is slowly disintegrating, or at the very least becoming way more flexible.

But if this film floats on a sea of animation history, let’s focus on the high school floating in it, the film itself. What does Dash Shaw want to talk about? A lot to be honest, in a film people have termed ‘mumblecore’. The term amuses me a lot, it’s basically just shorthand for films which have verbose and idiosyncratic dialogue at this point and is definitely much more useful for critics and potential audiences than it is for the makers of the films themselves. I think they just want to make films about people as real people as opposed to stock characters or idealised ones. My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea is about that, a fictionalised version of Dash and friends as their high school fractures off a cliff and sinks into the sea. They climb from layer to layer of this semi-allegorical high school, encountering loose political allegories and dangerous sharks.

More than that, they come to terms with the weird lessons of growing up, of checking your ego and of accepting the roles you give yourself. All this while not dying as the high school sinks. Honestly it’s not hard on first glance to mistake this as a weird remake of Poseidon (2006, Dir. Wolfgang Petersen or if you prefer the original The Poseidon Adventure: 1972, Dir. Ronald Neame) but set in a millennial high school. It’s definitely floating in a couple of inspirations, a cynical person would say it’s a Wes Anderson rip off. What a dumb criticism to make.

This is not a film which has the deepest darkest depths, high school students haven’t lived long enough to inspire that kind of focus. They wear their personalities on their sleeves, their desperation or delusional arrogance is one most people know all too well already. They grow, they realise they should try not to be cruel to each other and they do it with a far more subdued and surreal energy than most other exposés of high school life. That’s down a low-key but still very enjoyable voice acting cast. Still, you may have seen stories like these before if you’ve watched a lot of films, but that’s okay. Just because you’ve seen something similar before doesn’t ruin your experience of something new, in fact it usually enhances it.

I guess what made me talk about this though, is the boldness of Shaw’s low-key animation style. It is bold, it is simply drawn but wildly experimental and self-aware. Most importantly, it’s vivid. In a world filled with insanely detail and scarily lifelike CGI, it feels so comforting to have an animation which looks like a picture, a drawing. Something which has no interest in photorealism, and just is far more interested in exploring the bounds of what it can do as a picture, not pretending it isn’t one. Some of the colour sequences in it are just fantastic to be a part of, to see with your own two (or one) eyes. It’s animated style is one which does somersaults, electric somersaults exploding with colour and which delight you, even if nothing in the film threw me into the depths of feeling and emotion I could never recover from.

But then this film isn’t supposed to, I don’t think. This is the theme I’ve only just discovered now, is that almost all of this writing has been about what My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea is not. It’s not expensive, smooth-edged, army built animation. It’s not a Wes Anderson film. It’s a testament to my failure that I’ve barely spent any time talking about what the film actually is. And that’s one of the points of the film! It’s not that big a deal to just be what you are, and once you get past that you can just appreciate everything for what it is.

My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea is a film. That’s what it is, and so much more.

-Alex

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