Animated film drifts into pointlessness
“My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” is exactly what the title promises — an earthquake cuts loose a seaside high school, which drifts off into the ocean, slowly sinking as the students and faculty look for a way to survive.
It’s action-packed, and yet it’s not very compelling. Writer-director Dash Shaw uses cheap, hand-drawn animation and the character voices of Jason Schwartzman, Reggie Watts, Maya Rudolph, Lena Dunham and Susan Sarandon to somewhat interesting effect, but the story is strange seemingly for the sake of being strange, and Shaw’s sarcastic tone suggests that the whole thing is just a joke.
Annoyingly, Shaw has named the main character after himself. Dash Shaw is a journalism student heavily involved in the school paper, and as the story opens, he is on the verge of being booted for running a story on his best friend’s erectile dysfunction problem, a smear that’s not even true.
After some fast talking to keep himself on the newspaper staff, he uncovers documents that show that the school auditorium is seismically unsound. Sure enough, a quake shuffles the high school into the ocean. Some students and teachers drown, and the survivors struggle to stay alive by climbing to the upper floors as the building slowly sinks.
Sounds harrowing, but “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” is so rife with self-reflexive jokes and irony that it plays more like a sitcom than a disaster thriller, and although cheap hand-drawn animation can have its own artistic charm — see “Persepolis” and “The Red Turtle” — the look of the film can’t save it.
Shaw is a successful graphic novelist and has a following. Perhaps this movie is for his fans.