A young man has his first sexual adventures, while his sperm, given personification, fight to be the ones to enter the egg in Norway’s animated musical Spermageddon, directed by Rasmus A. Sivertsen & Tommy Wirkola.
Concepts normally without sentient life are often given so in animated features: action figures, building toys, bugs, food, emojis, even emotions, and more have been provided with a voice and story by the power of cinema, reflecting the nature of human life and emotion in their designed worlds. With Spermageddon, as the title suggests, build a society of sperm; Norweigan animator and Rasmus A. Siversten and Dead Snow-director Tommy Wirkola present their lives and wants (to be the one to impregnate) and everything stopping them, internally and externally, along with a story of a young man’s first sexual experiences.
Particularly, Simen (prepare for pun onslaught), an insecure young sperm, fearful of taking the journey of his purpose with his brethren. Additionally, John is a young human man, who the sperm live within, having a series of sexual experiences for the first time, along with slapstick issues, on a cabin trip with some friends. The pair of stories is used to tell a continual series of puns, physical gags, and other jokes based around sex, the body, body fluids, grossout gags, and seeing how far the concept can be stretched before it breaks like a cheap condom.
There is a lot of Pixar, but vulgar and sophomoric to Spermageddon. The obvious connection is Inside Out, following various body systems of a particular human and their actions. There are even cutaways to the brain with some figures at a console making decisions. The human world looks like Pixar; John is nearly a copy of Ratatouille’s Linguini, but filtered through the CG of insurance company ads.
Luckily, the sperm world looks much better, with far more detail and variety. This half of the story and visual design is clearly given more attention. There is a commendable effort to stuff as many puns about sex and everything around it. The world around the characters is loaded with locations and characters to provide a space to give all the jokes a home. The jokes pump quickly, coming often. A good many of them land, and there is a certain amount of cleverness to the whole conceit.
Spermageddon is a film that almost works, if not incredibly scattered with its execution. One can argue it’s not meant to work as a fully formed idea, or doesn’t need depth or a cohesive script. The stories, as they are, function as hangers to drape jokes. Writers Geir Vegar Hoel, Jesper Sundes, and Tommy Wrikola are adults, but I’m reminded of a pair of 13-year-olds thinking of the idea and throwing out every single thing they can think of, joke or story idea, and then writing a movie around it. “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” However, once the opening bang is complete and the story has to occur, it becomes stretched, having shot its focus early. Often, it feels like it’s trying too hard to wring a laugh with a “hey, hey, do you get it!”? tone.
It’s an easy reach to compare Spermageddon to Sausage Party, the notorious 2016 animated food flick. Sausage Party was also overly ribald, anything goes, with scat and other gross humor. But it was also a treatise on religion and the dangers of zealotism. Spermageddon is just the jokes in a standard animated story, even if slightly bent.
Slightly satirizing the nature of the non-adult animated film cliches is the closest Spermageddon comes to anything more than a series of sophomoric middle school jokes on a by-the-books story. Simen the sperm lead has to overcome insecurities and find himself, along with defeating the bully Jizzmo, a cocksure, macho sperm looking like Iron Man, complete with suit and goatee. Simen and his group have to take the amazing journey to do so, after his fear keeps him from doing his job. An early song riffs on the standard “be yourself to succeed” messaging. A side note: the songs do little to add to the film outside of “it’s a musical too! Isn’t that funny?!” There are few songs, as if an afterthought, and none are earworm worthy.
While I was pretty much done with Spermageddon by halfway through the runtime, it may have more traction for others, especially in a ready crowd of a midnight screening sort. There is a cleverness in the onslaught of jokes, and I give it for going fully into the concept.
Spermageddon is in official selection during the Seattle International Film Festival, May 15-25 in person and May 26 – June 1st for select encore streaming screenings. See Siff.net/festival for more information.