This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more reports from the ground throughout the fest.
Immediately before Fantastic Fest’s late-night screening of Norway’s animated musical Spermageddon, the fest employee introducing it described it as “the most midnight movie that ever midnighted.” It’s an accurate summary: Rasmus A. Sivertsen and Tommy Wirkola’s chipper, cheerfully transgressive look at the lives and ambitions of sperm sets out to cross all sorts of lines in the most wink-wink way possible. It’s overstuffed with immensely cheesy sex puns, animated in the style of a Pixar movie (to the point where the human protagonist looks startlingly like Alfredo from Ratatouille), and features a lot of imagery of body parts that don’t show up in Pixar animation. And the big climax — heh — is a musical number about abortion.
Frankly put, it’d take real daring for someone to try to screen Spermageddon in any mainstream American theater. And American distributors may not have the testicular fortitude.
That’s unfortunate, largely because Spermageddon might fall entirely flat in home viewing, without the comparative formality of a big screen and the communal boost of a big audience. It’s a film designed for a group setting, where you can hear the laughs and disbelieving groans as a bunch of singing, dancing sperm lament their life in the “fleshy, crinkly hell” of a scrotum, while calling each other “cumrade” and spouting lines like “Better ejacu-late than ejacu-never.”
Spermageddon is not a sophisticated movie. Maybe it isn’t even a good one: the story is simple and shallow, the humor is frequently juvenile, and the animation clearly shows the project’s budget limitations. The wall-to-wall semen puns (“I don’t mean to be a cummudgeon, but…”) get old quickly. But the songs are catchy, and the storytelling is often engagingly weird and playful. And the screenwriters (including Wirkola, director of the Dead Snow movies and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) are genre-savvy enough to know exactly what they’re lampooning in kids’ animation, and to make the parody elements specific and pointed.
One of the clearest indicators of what they’re doing with Spermageddon comes with the opening number. Nerdy sperm protagonist Simen is already neglecting his education at “Screwniversity,” where he’s meant to be focusing on the process of insemination, but is more interested in reading books about the rest of the human body. Pushed by his best friend Cumilla into discussing the future, he kicks off an opening number that feels like a mockery of every “I want to see the world” song that’s ever opened a Disney movie: Simen would much rather stay “in the ballsack,” where he’s safe from the many, many (pictured in an opening montage) ignominious fates that can befall ejaculate.
Most of the rest of his fellow sperm feel differently — particularly corporate overlord and alpha-sperm Jizzmo, who has designed a powerful mecha battle-suit that he thinks will let him dominate any race to an egg. (Even in an adult cartoon about sperm, tech bros are still the ultimate villains.) At first, it doesn’t seem like the suit will be necessary: He and his fellow sperm live in the testicles of a teenage boy named Jens, who they fear will never get laid, given that he’s devoted to his Xbox, the 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 equally ready to say goodbye to virginity. Suddenly, the race to “the gilded place” is on.
It’s probably best not to ask any questions about the practicalities or details of Simen and Cumilla’s world. Once you start, you might never stop: Why are there male and female gendered sperm? Since sperm don’t have hands, who’s knitting all the cute little turtlenecks so many of them are wearing? Where are they getting the materials to make things like neckties, mechas, laser weapons, cigars, and books? Above all, when one particularly domestic sperm suddenly pulls out a picnic lunch for his friends, what the hell kind of animal produced the glistening bone-in ham that’s part of that lunch?
Obviously, none of this matters. Anthropomorphizing inhuman things and glossing over questions about their society is Pixar’s stock in trade, and Spermageddon is openly modeled after Pixar movies. (Particularly the Inside Out films: Several sequences set in the control room of Jens’ mind cross over from parody into straight copycatting.) Tonally and visually, the film is remarkably close to a semen-themed spin on the raunchy animated comedy Sausage Party, another film that doesn’t really have coherent or consistent world-building on the brain. But that film has no real interest in its human characters, and Spermageddon does, which gives it a surprisingly sweet quality to offset all the silly stuff.
Lisa and Jens’ fumbling sexual encounters also push the movie’s sympathies in mighty odd directions. There’s a sweetness to the way this inexperienced-but-eager young couple’s experiments feel through the way porn and real sex are different, or how they navigate communication and the orgasm gap. Amid all this, the sperm characters’ devotion to bypassing Lisa’s considerable efforts at birth control to get her pregnant feels ugly and invasive, more obscene than anything else in this lovably vulgar movie. Wirkola and company certainly don’t believe every sperm is sacred, though: They kill their adorable little sperm protagonists off en masse, and the film even features an upbeat number about the value of abortion to people who aren’t ready to be parents.
That song alone is likely to scare American distributors away, guaranteeing that Spermageddon, as goofy and lightweight as it is, is unlikely to make it to multiplexes. The hesitance any mainstream distributor would feel about this one is understandable — it’s not a masterpiece. But Spermageddon is an amusing gag with catchy songs and a lot of things viewers will never have seen in animation before. Hopefully someone will eventually have the balls to give it a proper worldwide release.
