BEFORE: I was saving this one because it connects several different ways into my upcoming documentary chain / Summer Concert series, one actor also appears in that documentary about the Sparks Brothers and another appears in my closing documentary about Conan O'Brien - but I've determined that there are about a million other ways I could get into the documentary and concert chain. Right now the one I prefer is scheduled, but even if that path falls through for me, there are plenty of back-ups. And that frees up THIS film to appear here instead, in my animation block, as Maya Rudolph carries over from "Luca". Several of these actors carry over to another animated film tomorrow, and then a live-action path toward Mother's Day can begin.
THE PLOT: An earthquake causes a high school to float into the sea, where it slowly sinks like a shipwreck.
AFTER: Ah, this is a bit of a weird one. I learned about this one from a couple of sources, the director and animator, Dash Shaw, graduated from the School of Visual Arts a few years back (2005, I think) and I'm currently working for that school, by way of their theater, which used to a be a commercial cinema. People around the school still talk about their famous alumni, as you might expect, but also I work for a semi-famous animator (who also attended SVA for a time), and he gets to see nearly all of the animated films that get released, either through Academy screenings or at various festivals. So I've read my boss's reviews on HIS blog (which I type up for him) and I'm sure he must have reviewed this at some point, which is probably what put it on my radar.
The animation here is very crude, not just when compared to the slick CGI of Pixar or Dreamworks or Sony Animation, but crude just on the most basic level. Yes, we can understand that these are drawings of high-school students, but are they GOOD drawings of high-school students? No, they are not. There's not much consistency in the look of the characters over the course of the film, and then there are several key scenes where the characters are in silhouette or completely dark spaces - the professional animation term for this is "cheating". The backgrounds are often psychedelic splashes of color, which represents another form of cheat, so don't show up for this one expecting to see the type of animation you see on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon. This is one step above the film school student-level of animation, and it's clear that there wasn't a 20 or 30-person crew of animators working on this, probably just one, maybe two. Now, that's not ALWAYS a bad thing, necessarily, there's software out there these days that would allow one animator to do the work of maybe ten in the past. The days where there were rows and rows of lightbox desks in an animation sweatshop-type situation are long gone, now a couple of teens with laptops could probably bang out an animated film - but, the question remains, would that film be any GOOD?
The story is pure wish fulfillment - what teen hasn't wished that his high-school would be destroyed in cinematic fashion? For school to be cancelled for the next - well, several weeks at least, maybe months if the disaster was big enough, like an earthquake or a meteorite, or a big enough flood. The truth is, though, just because a building gets destroyed doesn't mean that's the end of school, you'd probably still have to go, they'd just hold classes at the town rec center or library or in the parking lot if they had to, because education is that important. That Alice Cooper song turned out to be very misleading.
The story we're dropped into here is about Dash (an obvious stand-in for the director) and his friend Assaf, who write articles for the Tides High School Gazette. Assaf forms a connection with their school paper's editor, Verti, and jealous Dash writes something bad about Assaf (umm, how did it get printed? Wouldn't the editor have rejected it?) and this goes on Dash's "permanent record". Dash breaks into the school archives to clear his record, and accidentally finds out that the inspection records on the school's new auditorium were tampered with, and the school is not as earthquake-proof as it should be. Wouldn't you know it, this is when an earthquake strikes, and the entire high school falls into the sea, as referenced in the title of the film.
From there, the story borrows quite a bit from films like "Titanic" and "The Poseidon Adventure", just with the giant ocean liners replaced by a high school. A plucky band of survivors has to make their way through the levels of the school, meeting various other survivors along the way, in the hope of being rescued. But since each floor of the school is devoted to a different year of students, the sophomores have to pass through the junior and senior levels on their way out, and thus their journey becomes a metaphor for the high-school experience itself - there's only one way out of high-school, in other words, you've got to age out of the program.
They've also got to work with Lunch Lady Lorraine, who manages to quell a riot, and Principal Grimm, who's feeling guilty over forging those inspection records - essentially, he's the captain who feels the responsibility for going down with the ship. There are a few clever things here, but I'm betting this film is still better enjoyed if you're stoned, it's got that feel to it. I don't know much about the illustration or comic-book work of this Dash Shaw fellow, but much of it released by Fantagraphics, the company that publishes "Love & Rockets", "Neat Stuff" by Peter Bagge, "Ghost World" by Daniel Clowes, and so on. What we used to call "alternative" comics, not the Marvel and DC superhero stuff, so a lot of sex and drugs stuff aimed at the slacker crowd.
I caught a couple references to "A Charlie Brown Christmas", too - all of the main characters (the ones that survive, anyway) dance at the end, and it's the same weird dance moves that you may recall the "Peanuts" characters doing.
Also starring the voices of Jason Schwartzman (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Reggie Watts (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Susan Sarandon (last seen in "Robot & Frank"), Lena Dunham (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Thomas Jay Ryan (last seen in "Equals"), Alex Karpovsky (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Louisa Krause (last seen in "Young Adult"), John Cameron Mitchell (last seen in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"), Matthew Maher (last seen in "The Killer Inside Me"), Margo Martindale (last seen in "Feast of Love"), Adam Lustick (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Jennifer Kim, Dan Lippert, Emily Davis, Keith Poulson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 lockers with air pockets
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