‘High School’ mixes disaster flick with satire
The plot of “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” — the feature debut of indie comics artist and writer Dash Shaw — is well encapsulated in the title. Set inside the four-story building that is the home of Tides High, the crudely animated, cleverly written comedy focuses on five characters struggling to save themselves when a cliff gives way, and that structure plunges intact into the ocean.
The hero, high school journalist Dash Shaw (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), is one part of a small band of smart, smart-alecky and bizarrely resourceful people that includes his best friend, Assaf (Reggie Watts); their editor on the school paper, Verti (Maya Rudolph); a popular Mean Girl named Mary (Lena Dunham); and the self-explanatory Lunch Lady, Lorraine (Susan Sarandon).
Dash is the kind of hyperarticulate, self-aware yet clueless character that Schwartzman played in “Rushmore.” “I love turgid prose,” he says, demonstrating that affinity in response to a comment by one of his companions: “Mary’s words sunk into our hero, like urine staining a pair of tightywhities,” Dash says.
In a sense, he is a standin for the director. That 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 grownup audiences, happy to be looking back on their own memories of high school’s life-or-death matters.
“My Entire High School” has a 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. I can’t help agreeing with Assaf, who observes, of his companions’ rescue plans, “I like it. It has the logic of a dream.”