This report comes from Implausible Fest 2024, the annual style movie pageant in Austin, Texas. We’ll have extra stories from the bottom all through the fest.
Instantly earlier than Implausible Fest’s late-night screening of Norway’s animated musical Spermageddon, the fest worker introducing it described it as “probably the most midnight film that ever midnighted.” It’s an correct abstract: Rasmus A. Sivertsen and Tommy Wirkola’s chipper, cheerfully transgressive have a look at the lives and ambitions of sperm units out to cross all kinds of strains in probably the most wink-wink means potential. It’s overstuffed with immensely tacky intercourse puns, animated within the fashion of a Pixar film (to the purpose the place the human protagonist seems startlingly like Alfredo from Ratatouille), and options a variety of imagery of physique elements that don’t present up in Pixar animation. And the large climax — heh — is a musical quantity about abortion.
Frankly put, it’d take actual daring for somebody to attempt to display Spermageddon in any mainstream American theater. And American distributors could not have the testicular fortitude.
That’s unlucky, largely as a result of Spermageddon may fall fully flat in residence viewing, with out the comparative formality of an enormous display and the communal enhance of an enormous viewers. It’s a movie designed for a bunch setting, the place you possibly can hear the laughs and disbelieving groans as a bunch of singing, dancing sperm lament their life within the “fleshy, crinkly hell” of a scrotum, whereas calling one another “cumrade” and spouting strains like “Higher ejacu-late than ejacu-never.”
Spermageddon just isn’t a complicated film. Possibly it isn’t even a superb one: the story is straightforward and shallow, the humor is continuously juvenile, and the animation clearly exhibits the undertaking’s funds limitations. The wall-to-wall semen puns (“I don’t imply to be a cummudgeon, however…”) get outdated shortly. However the songs are catchy, and the storytelling is usually engagingly bizarre and playful. And the screenwriters (together with Wirkola, director of the Lifeless Snow films and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) are genre-savvy sufficient to know precisely what they’re lampooning in youngsters’ animation, and to make the parody components particular and pointed.
One of many clearest indicators of what they’re doing with Spermageddon comes with the opening quantity. Nerdy sperm protagonist Simen is already neglecting his schooling at “Screwniversity,” the place he’s meant to be specializing in the method of insemination, however is extra curious about studying books about the remainder of the human physique. Pushed by his finest pal Cumilla into discussing the long run, he kicks off a gap quantity that looks like a mockery of each “I need to see the world” tune that’s ever opened a Disney film: Simen would a lot fairly keep “within the ballsack,” the place he’s secure from the various, many (pictured in a gap montage) ignominious fates that may befall ejaculate.
Many of the remainder of his fellow sperm really feel otherwise — notably company overlord and alpha-sperm Jizzmo, who has designed a strong mecha battle-suit that he thinks will let him dominate any race to an egg. (Even in an grownup cartoon about sperm, tech bros are nonetheless the final word villains.) At first, it doesn’t seem to be the swimsuit will likely be obligatory: He and his fellow sperm reside within the testicles of a teenage boy named Jens, who they worry won’t ever get laid, on condition that he’s dedicated to his Xbox, the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars films, and “studying Klingon.” However Jens is about to spend a weekend at a cabin with a bunch of mates, together with Lisa, an equally nerdy lady who’s equally able to say goodbye to virginity. Immediately, the race to “the gilded place” is on.
It’s most likely finest to not ask any questions in regards to the practicalities or particulars of Simen and Cumilla’s world. When you begin, you may by no means cease: Why are there female and male gendered sperm? Since sperm don’t have arms, who’s knitting all the lovable little turtlenecks so a lot of them are sporting? The place are they getting the supplies to make issues like neckties, mechas, laser weapons, cigars, and books? Above all, when one notably home sperm all of the sudden pulls out a picnic lunch for his mates, what the hell sort of animal produced the glistening bone-in ham that’s a part of that lunch?
Picture: Qvisten Animation
Clearly, none of this issues. Anthropomorphizing inhuman issues and glossing over questions on their society is Pixar’s inventory in commerce, and Spermageddon is overtly modeled after Pixar films. (Significantly the Inside Out movies: A number of sequences set within the management room of Jens’ thoughts cross over from parody into straight copycatting.) Tonally and visually, the movie is remarkably near a semen-themed spin on the raunchy animated comedy Sausage Get together, one other movie that doesn’t actually have coherent or constant world-building on the mind. However that movie has no actual curiosity in its human characters, and Spermageddon does, which supplies it a surprisingly candy high quality to offset all of the foolish stuff.
Lisa and Jens’ fumbling sexual encounters additionally push the film’s sympathies in mighty odd instructions. There’s a sweetness to the way in which this inexperienced-but-eager younger couple’s experiments really feel by the way in which porn and actual intercourse are totally different, or how they navigate communication and the orgasm hole. Amid all this, the sperm characters’ devotion to bypassing Lisa’s appreciable efforts at contraception to get her pregnant feels ugly and invasive, extra obscene than anything on this lovably vulgar film. Wirkola and firm actually don’t consider each sperm is sacred, although: They kill their cute little sperm protagonists off en masse, and the movie even options an upbeat quantity in regards to the worth of abortion to individuals who aren’t able to be mother and father.
That tune alone is prone to scare American distributors away, guaranteeing that Spermageddon, as goofy and light-weight as it’s, is unlikely to make it to multiplexes. The hesitance any mainstream distributor would really feel about this one is comprehensible — it’s not a masterpiece. However Spermageddon is an amusing gag with catchy songs and a variety of issues viewers won’t ever have seen in animation earlier than. Hopefully somebody will ultimately have the balls to provide it a correct worldwide launch.
