Will the Pixar-like sex musical Spermageddon ever be seen?

This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We'll have more on-site reports throughout the festival.

Immediately before the late-night screening of the Norwegian animation musical Spermageddonthe festival staffer who introduced it described it as “the most midnight movie ever made at midnight.” That's an apt summary: Rasmus A. Sivertsen and Tommy Wirkola's breezy, gleefully boundary-pushing look at the lives and ambitions of sperm tries to cross all sorts of boundaries in the most tongue-in-cheek way possible. It's chock-full of incredibly cheesy sex puns, animated in the style of a Pixar film (to the point where the human protagonist looks frighteningly like Alfredo from Ratatouille) and contains many images of body parts not seen in Pixar animations. And the big highlight – heh – is a musical number about abortion.

Frankly, it takes a lot of courage for someone to try Spermageddon in any American mainstream cinema. And American distributors may not have the necessary willpower.

This is unfortunate, especially because Spermageddon might be a total waste of time on home viewing, without the comparative formality of a big screen and the communal buoyancy of a large audience. It's a film designed for a group setting, where you can hear the laughter and groans of disbelief as a bunch of singing, dancing sperm bemoan their lives in the “fleshy, wrinkly hell” of a scrotum while calling each other “cumrade” and spouting lines like “Better to ejaculate late than never to ejaculate.”

Spermageddon is not a sophisticated film. Maybe it isn't even good: the story is simple and superficial, the humor is often childish, and the animation clearly shows the project's budgetary constraints. The constant sperm puns (“I don't mean to be silly, but…”) quickly become boring. But the songs are catchy and the narrative is often engagingly offbeat and playful. And the screenwriters (including Wirkola, director of the Dead Snow films and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters) are well versed in the genre, so they know exactly what they are poking fun at in children's animations and can use the parody elements in a targeted and pointed manner.

One of the clearest indicators of what they are doing with Spermageddon comes with the opening number. Nerdy sperm protagonist Simen is already neglecting his education at “Screwniversity,” where he should be focusing on the process of fertilization, but is more interested in reading books about the rest of the human body. Urged by his best friend Cumilla to talk about the future, he launches into an opening number that feels like a mockery of every “I wanna see the world” song that has ever opened a Disney film: Simen would much rather stay “in the scrotum,” where he's safe from the many, many (depicted in an opening montage) shameful fates that can befall ejaculate.

Most of his fellow sperms don't see it that way—notably corporate overlord and alpha sperm Jizzmo, who has developed a powerful mecha battle suit that lets him dominate any race for an egg. (Even in an adult cartoon about sperm, tech bros are still the ultimate villains.) At first, the suit doesn't seem necessary: ​​He and his fellow sperms live in the testicles of a teenager named Jens, who they fear will never have sex as he indulges in 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 for “the gilded place” is on.

It's probably best not to ask questions about the practicalities or details of Simen and Cumilla's world. Once you start, you may never stop: Why are there male and female sperm? Since sperm don't have hands, who knits all the cute little turtlenecks so many of them wear? Where do they get the materials to make things like ties, mechas, laser weapons, cigars, and books? And most importantly, when a particularly tame sperm suddenly pulls out a picnic lunch for its friends, what the hell kind of animal is that that produced the shiny bone-in ham that is part of that lunch?

Obviously none of this matters. Humanizing inhuman things and sugarcoating questions about their society is Pixar’s specialty, and Spermageddon is clearly modeled on the Pixar films. (The Inside Out films in particular: several sequences set in the control room of Jens' head go from parody to outright imitation.) Tonally and visually, the film is remarkably similar to a sperm-themed take on the raunchy animated comedy. Sausage partyanother film that doesn't really think about coherent or consistent world building. But this film has no real interest in its human characters, and Spermageddon does, which gives it a surprisingly sweet quality that makes up for all the silly stuff.

Lisa and Jens' awkward sexual encounters also push the film's sympathies in very odd directions. The experiments of this inexperienced but eager young couple seem cute because porn and real sex differ, or because of how they handle communication and the orgasm gap. Amid all this, the sperm characters' devotion to circumvent Lisa's considerable attempts at contraception to get pregnant seems ugly and intrusive, more obscene than anything else in this endearingly vulgar film. Wirkola and co. certainly don't believe every sperm is sacred, though: They kill their adorable little sperm protagonists en masse, and the film even includes an optimistic number about the value of abortion for people not yet ready to become parents.

This song alone should deter the American distributors and guarantee that Spermageddonas silly and superficial as it is, it probably won't make it to the multiplexes. The reluctance a mainstream distributor would feel towards this film is understandable – it is not a masterpiece. But Spermageddon is a fun gag with catchy songs and many things that viewers have never seen in cartoons before. Hopefully, someone will have the courage to release the film worldwide.