This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more reports from the ground up throughout the festival.
Directly before the late-night screening of the Norwegian animated musical at Fantastic Fest Sperm Geddonthe festival official who introduced it described it as “the most midnight movie that was ever midnight.” It’s an accurate summary: Rasmus A. Sivertsen and Tommy Wirkola’s gleefully, gleefully transgressive look at the lives and ambitions of sperm tries to cross all sorts of boundaries in the most wink-wink way possible. It’s overflowing with immensely cheesy sex puns, animated in the style of a Pixar film (to the point where the human protagonist looks remarkably like Alfredo from Ratatouille), and features lots of body part footage not seen in Pixar animation. And the big highlight — heh — is a musical number about abortion.
To be honest, it would take some real courage for someone to try Sperm Geddon in a mainstream American theater. And American distributors may not have the testicle power.
That’s a shame, especially because Sperm Geddon would be a huge disappointment when viewed at home, without the comparative formality of a big screen and the communal boost of a large audience. It’s a film designed for a group setting, where you can hear the laughter and disbelieving groans as a group of singing, dancing sperm lament their existence in the “fleshy, wrinkly hell” of a scrotum, calling each other “cumrade” and spouting lines like “Better ejacu-late than ejacu-never.”
Sperm Geddon is not a sophisticated film. Maybe it’s not even a good one: the story is simple and superficial, the humor is often childish, and the animation clearly shows the budget constraints of the project. The wall-to-wall cum puns (“I don’t mean to be a cummudgeon, but…”) get old fast. But the songs are catchy, and the story is often engagingly weird and playful. And the screenwriters (including Wirkola, director of the Dead Snow films and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) are well versed enough in the genre to know exactly what they are poking fun at in children’s animation and to make the parody elements specific and sharp.
One of the clearest indicators of what they are doing with Sperm Geddon comes the opening number. Nerdy sperm protagonist Simen neglects his education at “Screwniversity,” where he should be focusing on the process of insemination, but is more interested in reading books about the rest of the human body. Forced by his best friend Cumilla to discuss the future, he launches into an opening number that feels like a parody of every “I want to see the world” song that ever opened a Disney film: Simen would much rather stay “in the ballsack,” where he’ll be safe from the many, many (depicted in an opening montage) shameful fates that can befall ejaculate.
Most of the other sperm think otherwise—particularly the company boss and alpha sperm Jizzmo, who has designed a powerful mecha battle suit that he believes will allow him to dominate any race to the core. (Even in an adult cartoon about sperm, Tech bros are still the ultimate villains.) At first, the suit seems unnecessary: He and his fellow sperm are living in the testicles of a teenage boy named Jens, who they fear will never have sex, given his devotion 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 just as ready to say goodbye to her virginity. Suddenly, the race to “the gilded spot” 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 sex-specific sperm? Since sperm don’t have hands, who knits all those cute little turtlenecks that so many of them wear? Where do they get the materials to make things like neckties, mechas, laser guns, cigars, and books? And most importantly, if a particularly homely sperm suddenly whips up a picnic lunch for his friends, what on earth produced the shiny, bone-in ham that’s part of that lunch?
Clearly, none of this matters. Anthropomorphizing inhuman things and glossing over questions about their society is Pixar’s trademark, and Sperm Geddon is openly modeled after Pixar films. (The Inside Out films in particular: several scenes set in the control room of Jens’ mind go from parody to outright copycat.) In tone and imagery, the film comes remarkably close to a sperm-themed spin on the racy animated comedy Sausage partyanother film that doesn’t really have any coherent or consistent world building in mind. But that film has no real interest in its human characters, and Sperm Geddon does, which gives it a surprisingly sweet quality that makes up for all the nonsense.
Lisa and Jens’s awkward sexual encounters also push the film’s sympathies in strange directions. There’s a sweetness to the way this inexperienced but eager young couple’s experiments feel in the ways that porn and real sex differ, or how they deal with communication and the orgasm gap. Amid all this, the sperm characters’ dedication to circumventing Lisa’s considerable attempts at birth control to get her pregnant feels ugly and invasive, more obscene than anything else in this sweetly vulgar film. Wirkola and company certainly don’t buy it. every sperm is sacredalthough: They murder their cute little sperm protagonists en masse, and the film even has an optimistic song about the value of abortion for people who aren’t ready to be parents.
That song alone will likely scare off American distributors, which guarantees that Sperm GeddonAs goofy and lightweight as it is, it probably won’t hit multiplexes. The hesitation a mainstream distributor would feel about this is understandable — it’s no masterpiece. But Sperm Geddon is a funny joke with catchy songs and many things viewers have never seen in animation before. Hopefully someone will eventually have the balls to give it a proper worldwide release.