High School is the End of the World

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I once did a joke list of fancy-pants auteurs who should direct the fourth Jurassic Park movie (this was awhile back before Jurassic World became an actual thing) - therein I imagined what Woody Allen's version would look like, or what Werner Herzog would make of a dilophosaurus. Well if there's one thing I love almost as much as I love those damn dinos it's a Disaster Movie, and so I thought of that old list while watching the new animated thing called My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea -- because here we have what is essentially Wes Anderson's The Poseidon Adventure.

My Entire High School wasn't directed by Anderson - it was directed by graphic-novelist Dash Shaw, who's published several books but this is his first feature-length animated film. Anyway it's not just that the leading man is voiced by Jason Schwartzman that made me feel plunked down in Anderson-Town; Shaw has clearly spent some of his days making sweet sweet love to Fantastic Mr. Fox (as have we all) and the whole lot of quirky deadpan well-spoken fools populating those films. 

That's not a negative, and Shaw carves out his own little slice of heaven there. And anyway it's beautiful and funny and surprisingly mean-spirited at times (think of the scene in Moonlight Kingdom where the cute puppy gets an arrow, I guess)... and anyway it's a Disaster Movie and I'm literally incapable of not recommending a Disaster Movie, any Disaster Movie. This one is so its own thing in its own little world that it will sit proudly beside the genre greats... or it will at least have its own spot at the Freaks Table in the High School Cafeteria of the Disaster Movie Genre. Twister and Dante's Peak are high-fiving at the Cool Kid's Table, Rollercoaster is jerking off in the bathroom, and My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea is furiously scribbling in its spiral notebook in the corner nearest the exit.

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