Canadian Indie Animated Features On The Rise: ‘Space Cadet,’ ‘Death Does Not Exist,’ ‘Endless Cookie’

When the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) introduced an Animated Features competition in 2002, finding even a semi-decent Canadian feature — whether industry-backed or indie — was a serious challenge.

And when I first joined OIAF, the only one I could reliably recall was Pierre Hébert’s La Plante Humaine (1999). Between 2002 and 2016, only eight Canadian features were screened. But since 2018, that’s begun to shift: indie-driven films like When Adam Changes, Ville Neuve, and Archipel have gained traction on the festival circuit. Last year saw Sunburnt Unicorn and The Worlds Divide making the rounds, and this year’s Annecy Festival features three more in competition — Space Cadet, Death Does Not Exist, and Endless Cookie.

And you couldn’t ask for three more different features —Canadian or otherwise. What follows is a closer look at each of these distinctive titles from the Great White North.

Space Cadet by Kid Koala

The acclaimed Canadian DJ, multimedia producer, and visual artist known as Kid Koala (real name Eric San) is behind Space Cadet, his first animated film, which is a moving, minimalist meditation on family, loss, and love, based on his graphic novel of the same name.

Celeste is a young girl raised by a first-generation Guardianbot. The robot’s sole mission has been to nurture and guide Celeste into becoming a brilliant astronaut. When she is finally assigned her first solo mission in space, Robot is left behind on Earth. As the days pass, loneliness begins to erode his aging technological systems. Struggling to keep pace with a rapidly modernizing world, he finds solace in replaying memories of the joyful and humorous moments he shared with Celeste.

Space Cadet is a refreshing alternative to the relentless barrage of crass, loud, and sensory-overloading mainstream animation that seems designed to numb rather than inspire. Instead, San offers a subdued family work that is minimalist, gentle, and quiet. There are no cluttered backgrounds — thanks to some exquisite design work by Lilian Chan and art director Corinne Merrell.

“We deliberately tried to leave some space in the movie, both in tone/timing as well as visual design,” San explained to Cartoon Brew via email. “It is a nod to the sparseness of the original graphic novel panels but also an opportunity to give the audience some space to reflect on their own experiences and memories while watching the film.”

This aesthetic restraint extends beyond visuals; there is no endless babble or cloying pop songs. “For the majority of the film, the two main characters are planets apart,” San said. “Celeste is on her solo space mission and Robot is left behind on Earth. It’s through a series of flashbacks that their special bond is revealed.”

Thus, the score becomes a vehicle for emotional resonance, drawing from a collection of lullabies San originally composed for his daughter. “I expanded on a number of those musical themes for the film,” he noted. “It was a delicate but enjoyable process to find a balance between the lullaby-like piano numbers, the nostalgic timeless songbook classics, and the modern spacey ambient work in the score.”

San, who grew up watching silent films with his grandmother, saw Space Cadet as an opportunity to recreate that shared sense of wonder. “One of my fondest memories from childhood was hearing my grandmother belly laugh at Charlie Chaplin films,” he recalled. “The comic books and graphic novels I’ve drawn over the years are also told without dialogue. In a way, I guess the books can read like storyboards for a silent film.”

Still, adapting his wordless graphic novel into an animated feature wasn’t something he had always envisioned. It only came to life after producer Ginette Petit enlisted screenwriter Mylène Chollet to help expand the story. “I remember reading the very first draft, and it was such a thoughtful, poignant treatment of the characters and story that I cried while reading it a few times. By the time I got to the last page of the script, I told myself, ‘We have to make this movie!’”

In spirit, Space Cadet evokes the quiet poignancy of children’s author Margaret Wise Brown’s classics (Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny). Her works are hauntingly tender and filled with an ever-present, indefinable sadness — qualities that echo throughout San’s film. “This film can be quite emotional in places,” he reflected. “It tackles some bittersweet ideas like loss, aging, and the cycles of generations. Kids innately have a high emotional intelligence and empathy. The story in Space Cadet is a gentle reminder to cherish the moments you have together with loved ones. Often it’s the quiet, shared moments that mean the most to us.”

Ultimately, Space Cadet trusts its audience, young and old alike, to sit with silence, to feel deeply, and to find meaning in the smallest gestures. It’s a film that respects the intelligence and emotional depth of its viewers, offering not spectacle, but solace.

Death Does Not Exist by Felix Dufour-Laperrière

Felix Dufour-Laperrière has established himself with mature works that blur the lines between documentary and fiction, probing the historical and political complexities of Quebec’s fraught relationship with the rest of Canada. In Death Does Not Exist, he branches into new territory, delving into questions of identity, ethics, and the choices — made or deferred — that define our brief lives.

A band of armed young activists overruns a grand estate, but after a violent shootout goes astray, Hélène breaks away and flees into the forest. There, she encounters fellow activist Manon, perhaps a figment of her own guilt, forcing Hélène to confront her innermost values and sense of self. In the depths of the woods, she also meets a child who shares her name, suggesting echoes of Hélène’s own past or possible futures.

Dufour-Laperrière began working on the story over ten years ago. “At the very beginning,” he recalled, “I thought of a tragic tale, a mix of the ‘October crisis’ and Alice in Wonderland, in contemporary Quebec. The writing was also an exploration of my own paradoxes, beliefs, and contradictions.” That duality — between realism and fable, the political and the personal — runs through the film like an underground current.

Rendered in a palette of forest green, deep crimson, and muted white-gold, the film imbues its characters with a statuesque, almost mythic presence. Dufour-Laperrière explained: “I’ve colored the digital hand-drawn animation using painted colors on paper. The goal was to create a sense of closeness between the characters and the spaces they inhabit… a dynamic relationship. The film itself is structured as an evolving color palette; it can be read as a sequence of color fields.”

That painterly design is not just aesthetic but thematic. “The statues,” he continued, “symbolize an opposition between what is stable, still, dead, and what is moving, alive, evolving. Stillness versus movement, certainty versus uncertainty, possibilities and impossibilities.” This graphic tension parallels the philosophical ones faced by Hélène: her choices seem equally impossible, yet must be made.

At its core, Death Does Not Exist is a multilayered meditation on identity and morality. Echoing Kierkegaard’s insight that whatever choice we make, we are bound to regret it, the film raises broader questions about politics, economics, and the environment: do uprisings truly effect lasting change, or are they ultimately destined to return us to the very status quo they sought to overturn?

These are questions Dufour-Laperrière doesn’t shy away from. “I think that it is our responsibility, intimately and collectively, to keep this world livable and decent. For everyone. To cherish and defend the links and relations that make us free.”

Yet he acknowledged the paradox: “I wanted to explore… a tragic opposition: the impossibility of violence and the impossibility of the status quo. Violence is impossible in the sense that once it is unleashed, it spreads out of control. On the other hand, and for a lot of reasons, the actual state of the world isn’t bearable. It is tragic. Yet it may, in maybe unexpected ways, rise as an opportunity.”

Death Does Not Exist is both visually hypnotic and intellectually bracing — a cinematic riddle in which memory, myth, and morality collide. It doesn’t offer easy answers, but in a world of spectacle and distraction, it insists on the power of reflection, and the deep, often contradictory desires that drive us.

Endless Cookie by Seth and Peter Scriver

This sensory swirling animated documentary by Seth Scriver, co-director of Asphalt Watches (2013), is a multi-layered wonder — part-family portrait, part-magic realist adventure, and part-unflinching critique of Canada’s long-standing — and ongoing — brutal, cold, and often calculated mistreatment of Indigenous people.

The basic premise is this: Seth receives Canadian funding to make a documentary in seven weeks about his relationship with his half-brother Peter, who lives in the remote community of Shamattawa in Northern Manitoba. Born of the same father but 16 years apart — Peter’s mother being Cree, Seth’s being white — their relationship has been complicated. Seth travels north to record Peter’s stories and meet extended family members. But what starts as a modest project evolves into something far deeper, stretching over a decade and capturing the messiness and beauty of family, identity, and memory.

The film’s animation is an extension of that messiness. Seth did most of the character designs and animation himself, shaping each one with his family’s reactions in mind. “If they laughed, I knew I was on the right track,” he told Cartoon Brew. The designs reflect a vivid mix of intuition and inside jokes. His niece Cookie appears as a literal cookie, a cosplay-loving nephew is animated in one of his signature outfits, and Rusty Redhead is drawn as a red milk jug cap, a reference to local packaging and a childhood nickname.

The visual world is a bold mix of South Park, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and Gary Baseman — a raw, colorful, and weirdly beautiful aesthetic. “Some characters are simple. Some are deep in meaning,” he explained. “I never wanted the characters to look too polished.” That looseness mirrors the film’s tone: absurd and comic on the surface, grounded and emotional underneath. “It wasn’t about separating fantasy from reality. The stories are surreal because that’s just life up there. Everyone treats them as normal.”

Despite its handmade feel, the project was a technical mountain. “I animated most of it myself over nine years, with only two months of help from Julian Gallese,” Seth said. “Just organizing the files was a job in itself.” He credits Annex Post’s Alex Ordanis and editor Sydney Cowper with helping assemble the mountain of footage into something coherent. “That workflow chart was beautiful,” he said with a laugh.

The film also includes a meta-layer where the documentary pokes fun at its own production. “We thought it’d be funny to show the grant process and make jokes about Canadian funding. Honestly, it was a little terrifying to make fun of the grants officer. But it seemed like the perfect thing to do.”

One of the film’s most touching elements comes halfway through, when the animation gives way to real photos of the family. “At first, we were trying to avoid any interruptions and make a professional recording,” Seth recalled. “But with Pete living in a four-bedroom house with eight kids and sixteen dogs, that was impossible.” So instead of cutting around the chaos, they embraced it.

“Every interruption became a sequence. Each kid ended up with their own moment, and suddenly the whole thing was a family portrait.” The sudden appearance of real photographs doesn’t shatter the illusion — it deepens it. “Somehow, seeing the real people after all that animation made them even more real and endearing. I don’t know how it works, but I know it did something special.”

In the end, Endless Cookie is more than a documentary. It’s a collaborative act of remembering, reconnecting, and redefining what family means. “Now we get to hang out more, show the movie, and have these little family reunions,” Seth said. “Pete hadn’t been to Toronto in 32 years. When we premiered at Sundance and passed through the city, he got to connect with our Toronto family. It was really nice. What a great way to finish a film about family, by actually coming together.”

Endless Cookie is also an important counter to the saccharine family narratives peddled by mainstream media. Families, as Scriver shows with unapologetic honesty, deep love, and compassion, are messy and inconsistent. Sometimes they work for a while, then they don’t — and that’s okay. This is most families, in fact. We should stop labeling them as “broken” or “fractured.” They’re just families. Anywhere there is love, protection, loyalty, openness, and compassion, there is a family, even if it looks unconventional or “ugly” to an outsider’s eye.