MAUDIE IS A PORTRAIT OF A NOVA SCOTIA PAINTER WHOSE CANVAS WAS HER LIFE, AND WHOSE LIFE WAS HER CANVAS.

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea

If that mouthful of a title doesn’t provide enough information, know that My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea is basically The Poseidon Adventure meets The Breakfast Club. It’s also animated, so frantically at times that the film carries an epilepsy warning.

Comic book artist and animator Dash Shaw wrote and directed this tale of a smart-aleck California highschooler (also named Dash) who learns that an engineering fault in the school’s new top-floor auditorium has left the building vulnerable in the event of even a minor earthquake.

Three guesses as to what happens when the ground shimmies.

That rather slim plot and the film’s brief running time (just 76 minutes from stem to stern) are enlivened by some excellent voice actors, including Jason Schwartzman as Dash; Reggie Watts as his best friend, Assaf; Maya Rudolph as Verti, Assaf’s school-newspaper editor and crush; Lena Dunham as Mary, the popular girl; and Susan Sarandon as Lunch Lady Lorraine.

The story is a sly mix of first-rate adventure and secondary-education satire, with Lunch Lady Lorraine revealing unexpected fighting skills, and Mary leading the way to a rescue by climbing an elevator shaft, to borrow a phrase from budding journalist Assaf, “like an especially courageous treeclimbing sloth.”

There’s a dopey senior, an even dopier drug-dealer, a principal with an eye patch, and important survival lessons like the fact that even sharks like popular students. (That alone explains what happened to Blake Lively in The Shallows.)

The whole thing plays out as though it might all be taking place in the imagination of Dash (the character) or Dash (the writer/director), which is fair enough – highschool disaster movies since Donnie Darko have taught us that students are not to be trusted, especially if they’re taking a creative writing course. ∂∂∂

TIFF My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea.