My Biggest Mistake Was Winning This Race

There’s something that feels familiar about My Biggest Mistake Was Winning This Race. It doesn’t quite fit the adult-orientated absurdist themes that it explores, but it’s almost like Inside Out. It takes a look at the inner workings of the human body in order to draw humour and life lessons from a personification of what’s going on inside us, but in this case, it’s a bunch of sperms on their way to inseminate an ovarian egg.

It starts as it means to go on. The first scene we see is a series of visual gags that present the inner walls of a vagina as if they’re a metropolitan underpass. As the sperm travel, there are graffiti-like markings from past partners and STIs. Much like the markings, the sperm that are there all have a personality of their own, and they’re all competing with one another to become the one that can form a new life.

The humour is essentially a high school take on how babies are made, but that isn’t to say it feels immature. It achieves what it’s aiming for mostly, and that’s just a slacker-style comedy about sperm.

Some of the characterisations of the sperms can be a bit too on the nose. There are conversations about future jobs and the impact that they’ll have on the world, as if the sperms have been sentient members of society before arriving here. It isn't that it misses the point of looking at things from the perspective of something that isn't, but it's something that could've been a bit more purposeful. It would’ve perhaps been a bit more pertinent if they were loveably naive rather than being presented as all-knowing before birth.

Where there could have been some really interesting opportunities for meaningful thoughts on what it means to be alive, this is really just a loose look at what’s going on in modern society.

With a charming art style and a concept that will raise a smile, it’s certainly okay. Where it comes short in becoming anything more weighty, it comfortably manages to give us a few minutes of cheap humour, and sometimes that’s all that needs to be delivered. It could have been more, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be.