INdieWire — December 12, 2022
Coming of Age with ‘My Year of Dicks’
There are plenty of dicks in Annecy Cristal winner “My Year of Dicks,” but very few literal penises. The hilarious and sweetly touching animated short film with a story told in five chapters follows 15-year-old Pam’s determined quest to lose her virginity in the 1990s in a small town in Texas. Her kaleidoscopic journey populated with a cast of unsavory characters echoes coming-of-age movies like “Dazed and Confused” and “Superbad.”
Deftly written by author and screenwriter Pamela Ribon (“Moana,” “Ralph Breaks the Internet”) and directed by Icelandic filmmaker, artist, and animator Sara Gunnarsdóttir (“The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” “The Case Against Adnan Syed”), the 26-minute “My Year of Dicks” is adapted from Ribon’s memoir, “Notes to Boys (And Other Things I Shouldn’t Share in Public).”
The short began to take shape shortly after “Notes to Boys” was published, in a meeting between the writer and FX Networks. “And once we started talking about being able to take these letters into fantasy realms, I got very intrigued,” she said.
“It was probably a year before I got the green light to bring on a team,” Ribon continues. “So even then the whole time it was a feeling of, ‘Well, this will never happen. This is not real.’ I’m making something that I haven’t really seen before, and it’s so personal that it felt like, ‘Well, I’m going to chase this for as long as I can.’ It was always fun, like, ‘Are we going to get away with this?’” (Read full story…)