My Entire High School Is Sinking Into the Sea (***)

The high school comedy has become a staple genre for decades. From John Hughes and his breakfast club  to last year's amazing The Edge of Seventeen, there seem to be endless ways to tell a story of kids just going about the most important part of their lives: school.

"My Entire High School" is the feature debut of Dash Shaw, an animator who paints the film like it's a canvas - literally. He takes on a simple story: that of a seaside high school and the newspaper team facing bitter rivalry and internal competition. The hero, Dash, has a long-time professional relationship with his fellow classmate Assaf, but when Assaf is reassigned to cover a story of a rooftop auditorium, so launches an anger that ultimately leads Dash to a wild discovery: that the building's safety codes were forged and that even the slightest earthquake could break the cliffside building off into the ocean.

Well, there's an earthquake, and as predicted, the school becomes a floating island that is beginning a slow descent to the ocean floor. Floor by floor the saltwater rises, and students work their way up floor by floor in an attempt to meet a rescue team at the roof. Dash, Assaf, and their editor Verti work their way through the crumbling school, gathering together a crack team of misfits on a journey to find air in the ever-sinking school. They even join forces with the lunch lady, a brute woman who can lift 10 students at a time on her back and dreamed of becoming a master chef.

As you can see from the picture, the animation of the film is the main takeaway to note. Scenes are painted with crude black outlines, and the jerky appearance of characters and the amateur look of the film is quite nearly an offense to our senses. In closeups, you can quite literally see the brushstrokes of paint in the face. In wide shots, characters have the rendering of a kindergartener's free hand. It is clear that the director deliberately sought a disorientating style, but I will be first to admit that while the colors are vibrant and the scenes are as though dreamlike, it's hard to follow a plot when there is simply no rhyme or reason to what we are witnessing. I learned that the director used an animation feature in Photoshop to craft these scenes. There's an amateur look that is unlike anything you have likely seen in an animated movie.

The story is filled with a dry comedy that might find kinship with Wes Anderson, and even the way we pan over maps of the school and symmetrical framing might indicate that Anderson is more than a muse for the inspiration. There's violence that is never meant to be shocking (even though the popular girl is viciously torn apart by sharks near the student lounge and the principal falls to his death in a fiery plummet) and absurdity that shouldn't be overthought. The pitfalls I encountered with such a bizarre looking film were coupled with yet a greater sense of silliness. Perhaps the story is stretched too thin (and a small scene in which we see the Seniors have enforced martial law on the top floor is much too short), perhaps the quality doesn't muster enough for a 70-minute movie. Regardless, I laughed my way along and came out on the other side amused.