Will Pixar-Inspired Sex Musical Spermageddon Ever Be Seen?

This report is from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll be bringing you more on-the-ground reporting throughout the festival.

Just before the night screening of the Norwegian animated musical at Fantastic Fest Spermageddonthe festival staffer who introduced it described it as “the most nocturnal film that ever happened.” That’s an accurate summary: Rasmus A. Sivertsen and Tommy Wirkola’s joyous, gleefully transgressive look at the lives and ambitions of spermatozoa sets out to cross all sorts of boundaries in the most winking way possible. It’s full of extremely corny sexual puns, animated in the style of a Pixar movie (to the point that the human protagonist looks strikingly like Alfredo from Ratatouille), and features plenty of footage of body parts that don’t appear in Pixar animations. And the highlight — heh — is a musical number about abortion.

To be honest, it would take some serious daring for someone to try to sift through Spermageddon in any mainstream American cinema. And American distributors may not have the courage to do so.

This is unfortunate, largely because Spermageddon The film might fall flat at home, were it not for the relative formality of a big screen and the communal impulse of a large audience. It’s a movie designed for a group setting, where you can hear the incredulous laughter and groans of a group of singing and dancing spermatozoa lamenting their lives in the “fleshy, wrinkled hell” of a scrotum, while calling each other “cumrade” and spouting phrases like “Better to cum late than never.”

Spermageddon is not a sophisticated film. Maybe it’s not even good: the story is simple and superficial, the humor is often juvenile, and the animation clearly shows the limits of the project’s budget. The puns about sperm (“I don’t want to be an asshole, but…”) quickly become tiresome. But the songs are catchy, and the storytelling is often engaging, strange, and playful. And the writers (including Wirkola, director of the films Dead Snow and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters) are genre savvy enough to know exactly what they’re mocking in children’s animation and to make the parody elements specific and pointed.

One of the clearest indicators of what they are doing with Spermageddon The first number is accompanied by the song. Simen, the sperm protagonist, is already neglecting his studies at “Screwniversity”, where he is supposed to focus on the insemination process, but is more interested in reading books about the rest of the human body. Urged by his best friend Cumilla to discuss the future, he begins an opening number that sounds like a parody of every “I want to see the world” song that has ever opened a Disney movie: Simen would rather stay “in the balls”, where he is safe from the many, many (illustrated in an opening montage) ignominious fates that can befall ejaculates.

Most of the other sperm have a different opinion, especially business leader and alpha sperm Jizzmo, who has designed a powerful mechanical battle suit that he claims will allow him to dominate any race for the egg. (Even in an adult cartoon about sperm, tech geeks are always the ultimate bad guys.) At first, it doesn’t seem like the suit is necessary: ​​He and his fellow sperm are living in the testicles of a teenage boy named Jens, who they fear will never be able to sleep with, given his devotion to his Xbox, 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 is also ready to say goodbye to her virginity. Suddenly, the race to “the golden place” is on.

It’s probably best not to ask about the practicalities or details of Simen and Cumilla’s world. Once you start, you won’t be able to stop: Why are there male and female sperm? Since sperm don’t have hands, who knits all the cute little turtlenecks they wear? Where do they get the materials to make things like ties, mechs, laser weapons, cigars, and books? Especially when a particularly domestic sperm suddenly throws a picnic for his friends, what kind of animal produced the shiny bone-in ham that’s part of that lunch?

Obviously, none of this matters. Anthropomorphizing inhuman things and glossing over issues of their society is Pixar’s stock in trade, and Spermageddon is overtly modeled on Pixar films. (In particular, the Inside Out films: several sequences set in Jens’s mind control room cross the line between parody and outright copying.) In tone and image, the film is remarkably close to a sperm-themed version of the raunchy animated comedy Sausage Festivalanother movie that doesn’t really have any coherent or consistent world-building in mind. But this movie isn’t really interested in its human characters, and Spermageddon does, which gives it a surprisingly sweet quality to offset all the nonsense.

Lisa and Jens’s awkward sexual encounters also push the film’s sympathies in some very strange directions. There’s a sweetness to the way this inexperienced but eager young couple’s experiences are felt through the difference between porn and real sex, or the way they navigate the communication and orgasm gap. Amidst all this, the sperm characters’ devotion to circumventing Lisa’s considerable efforts at contraception to get her pregnant feels ugly and invasive, more obscene than anything else in this adorably vulgar film. Wirkola and company certainly don’t believe that every sperm is sacred, though: They kill their adorable little sperm protagonists en masse, and the film even offers an upbeat number on the value of abortion for people who aren’t ready to be parents.

This song alone is likely to scare away American distributors, ensuring that Spermageddonas ridiculous and light as it is, has little chance of being shown in multiplexes. The hesitation that any mainstream distributor might have towards it is understandable: it is not a masterpiece. But Spermageddon is a fun gag with catchy songs and a lot of things viewers will never have seen before in an animated film. Hopefully someone will finally have the courage to give it a proper worldwide release.