This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival held in Austin, Texas. We'll have more reports from the scene throughout the festival.
Immediately before the evening screening of the Norwegian animated musical at Fantastic Fest SpermageddonThe festival employee who introduced it described it as “the most midnight movie ever.” That’s an accurate summary: Rasmus A. Sivertsen and Tommy Wirkola’s gleefully transgressive look at the lives and ambitions of sperm sets out to cross all kinds of boundaries in the cheesiest way possible. It’s packed with immensely corny sexual puns, animated in the style of a Pixar movie (to the point where the human protagonist looks uncannily like Alfred from Pisto), and features lots of images of body parts that don't appear in Pixar animation. And the big climax—lol—is a musical number about abortion.
Frankly, it would take a lot of nerve for someone to try to leak… Spermageddon in any mainstream American cinema. And American distributors may not have the testicular fortitude.
This is unfortunate, in large part because Spermageddon It may not be all that good if watched at home, without the comparative formality of a big screen and the collective momentum of a large audience. It is a film designed for a group setting, where you can hear the incredulous laughter and moans of a group of spermatozoa singing and dancing and bemoaning their life in the “fleshy, wrinkled hell” of a scrotum, while calling each other “comrades” and spouting phrases like “Better to ejaculate late than never.”
Spermageddon It's not a sophisticated movie. Maybe it's not even good: the story is simple and shallow, the humor is frequently childish, and the animation clearly shows the project's budgetary limitations. The semen puns (“I don't want to be a jerk, but…”) get old quickly. But the songs are catchy and the storytelling is often engagingly odd and playful. And the screenwriters (including Wirkola, director of the Dead Snow and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters) are knowledgeable enough about the genre to know exactly what they are satirizing in children's animation and to make the parody elements specific and targeted.
One of the clearest indicators of what they are doing with Spermageddon It comes with the opening number. Sperm-nerd protagonist Simen is already neglecting his education at “Screwniversity,” where he’s supposed to be focusing on the process of insemination but is more interested in reading books about the rest of the human body. Urged by his best friend Cumilla to talk about the future, he launches into an opening number that seems like a mockery of every “I Want to See the World” song that’s ever begun a Disney movie: Simen would rather stay “in the egg sack,” where he’s safe from the many, many (portrayed in an opening montage) ignominious fates that can befall ejaculation.
Most of his fellow spermatozoa think otherwise, particularly corporate overlord and alpha sperm Jizzmo, who has designed a powerful mechanical combat suit that he believes will allow him to dominate any race until he gets an egg (even in an R-rated cartoon about spermatozoa, the techno-brothers are still the ultimate villains). At first, it doesn't seem like the suit is necessary: he and his fellow spermatozoa live in the testicles of a teenage boy named Jens, who they fear will never get laid, given that he's so passionate about his Xbox, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars movies, and “learning Klingon.” But Jens is about to spend a weekend at a cabin with a group of friends, including Lisa, an equally nerdy girl who's just as ready to say goodbye to her virginity. Suddenly, the race to “the golden place” is on.
It's probably best not to ask questions about the nuts and bolts of Simen and Cumilla's world. Once you start, you may never stop: why are there male and female-gendered sperm? If sperm don't have hands, who knits all the cute turtlenecks so many of them wear? Where do they get the materials to make things like ties, fuses, laser guns, cigars and books? Especially when one particularly domestic sperm suddenly brings out a picnic lunch for his friends, what on earth animal produced the glistening bone-in ham that's part of that lunch?
Image: Qvisten Animation
Obviously, none of this matters. Anthropomorphizing inhuman things and glossing over issues about their society is Pixar's craft, and Spermageddon It's openly inspired by Pixar films (in particular, the Inside Out films: several sequences set in the control room of Jens's mind veer from parody to outright imitation). In tone and visuals, the film comes remarkably close to a semen-themed version of the raunchy animated comedy. Sausage Partyanother movie that has no coherent or consistent world building on the brain. But that movie has no real interest in its human characters and Spermageddon It does, which gives it a surprisingly sweet quality to make up for all the silliness.
Lisa and Jens’s clumsy sexual encounters also push the film’s sympathies in some very strange directions. There’s a sweetness to the way this inexperienced but eager young couple’s experiments feel across the difference between porn and real sex, or how they handle communication and the orgasm gap. Amidst all this, the sperm characters’ devotion to circumventing Lisa’s considerable efforts to get birth control so she gets pregnant feels ugly and invasive, more obscene than anything else in this endearingly vulgar film. Wirkola and company certainly don’t believe all sperm are sacred, though: They kill their adorable sperm protagonists en masse, and the film even features an optimistic number about the value of abortion for people who aren’t ready to be parents.
That song alone is likely to scare off American distributors, ensuring that SpermageddonAs silly and light-hearted as it is, it is unlikely to reach multiplexes. The hesitation any mainstream distributor would feel about this film is understandable: it is not a masterpiece. But Spermageddon It's a fun romp with catchy songs and plenty of things viewers will never have seen before in an animated film. Hopefully, someone will have the courage to release it worldwide.