Laughs not watered down in 'High School Sinking'

The plot of “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea,” the feature debut of indie comics artist and writer Dash Shaw, is pretty well encapsulated in the title.

Set inside the four-story Tides High School, the crudely animated, yet cleverly written comedy focuses on five characters struggling to save themselves when a cliff gives way, plunging their intact school into the ocean.

The hero, high school journalist Dash (voice of Jason Schwartzman), is one part of a small band of smart, smart-alecky and bizarrely resourceful people who include his best friend, Assaf (Reggie Watts); their editor on the school paper, Verti (Maya Rudolph); a popular Mean Girl named Mary (Lena Dunham); and Lunch Lady Lorraine (Susan Sarandon, in a delightfully tough vocal performance).

Dash is the kind of hyperarticulate, self-aware yet clueless character that Schwartzman played in “Rushmore.”

“I love turgid prose,” he says, before demonstrating that affinity, in response to a comment by one of his companions: “Mary's words sunk into our hero, like urine staining a pair of tighty-whities,” Dash says, as if writing their adventures in his head.

In a sense, as a stand-in for the director, he is.

That wry sense of knowing detachment pervades “My Entire High School,” which is part disaster film and part satire of high school dramas about popularity and relationship status.

Although distributed by Gkids, this PG-13 film isn't exactly for little children.

Truly cool high-schoolers — the freaks, geeks and misfits — will appreciate its sardonic nihilism, as will more grown-up audiences happy to be looking back on their own memories of high school's life-or-death matters, instead of living them.

“My Entire High School” has an unpretentiously trippy animation style, combining psychedelic backgrounds with the kind of characters you'd expect to find on the back of some art student's spiral notebook.

It's crazy and ridiculous at times.

But I can't help agreeing with Assaf, who observes, of his companions' rescue plans, “I like it. It has the logic of a dream.”

“My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea”

★ ★ ★

<b>Starring:</b> Jason Schwartzman, Lena Dunham, Maya Rudolph, Susan Sarandon, Reggie Watts

<b>Directed by:</b> Dash Shaw

<b>Other:</b> A GKIDS release. Rated PG-13 for drug use, language, sexual situations and violence. At the Music Box Theatre, Chicago. 77 minutes