Film

Powell Peralta: The Search for Animal Chin

A 1987 skateboarding odyssey following the Bones Brigade crew across California, Nevada, and Hawaii searching for a legendary sage. It's a high-energy mix of skating sequences, deadpan humour, and genuine camaraderie—less documentary than fever dream. Essential viewing for skate culture enthusiasts and anyone curious about how youth subcultures made art from concrete.

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love skateboarding documentaries that feel like a road trip with the boys, loose and goofy, where the hunt matters more than any polished narrative.

Skip it if you want a tight story or real depth, since this is a 66-minute skate video built on pranks, tricks and hanging out, with little beyond that.

What it asks of you: Sixty-six minutes, mostly quick cuts of skating and banter, so it rewards easy attention and asks nothing more than a willingness to enjoy the ride.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Dogtown and Z-Boys2002

The definitive origin story of modern skateboarding, tracing the Z-Boys who invented the style Animal Chin perfected. Raw archival footage and interviews capture the birth of a counterculture. Watching this first deepens everything that follows.

But It's structured like a documentary essay, not a narrative. Long stretches of talking heads over music may feel slow if you want constant action.

Dogtown and Z-Boys poster

One Step Beyond1988

Powell Peralta's follow-up. If you loved Animal Chin's chaos and humour, this cranks both to eleven. Skaters at the absolute peak of their powers doing impossible things, tied together by even weirder storylines.

But It doubles down on the absurdist tone. If you wanted plot coherence, you'll find even less here than in Animal Chin.

One Step Beyond poster

Lords of Dogtown2005

A narrative dramatization of Dogtown's rise, starring Heath Ledger. Real character arcs, genuine emotion, the seismic cultural shift that made Animal Chin possible. Bridges skate history and mainstream cinema beautifully.

But It fictionalizes heavily and downplays the actual women who shaped the scene. Some skate purists find it sanitized.

Lords of Dogtown poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Powell Peralta: The Search for Animal Chin

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Quadrophenia1979

Both are immersive records of how young people build entire worlds—culture, ethics, ritual, language—around a style nobody else understands. Same structure, radically different mood.

A different youth subculture in a different era (1960s mods vs 80s skaters) but constructed identically: tribal belonging, risk-taking, visual style as identity, constant movement. The same emotional engine in a leather jacket instead of a Bones Brigade shirt.

But It's a serious drama about working-class rage, not a celebration. The film ends in tragedy, and the tone never lightens.

Quadrophenia poster
More like this (5)

Future Primitive1985

Another early Powell Peralta video that pioneered the format Animal Chin perfected. Fast, funny, stylish. Shows how rapidly the medium evolved in those handful of years.

But At 25 minutes, it's closer to a long music video than a film. Some viewers find that brevity unsatisfying.

Future Primitive poster

Hocus Pocus1993

Powell Peralta evolved into the 90s here, maintaining the inventive spirit and athletic spectacle while the world around them changed. Proof the crew stayed hungry and weird.

But By the 90s, skate videos had become more polished and less eccentric. Some of the raw magic is professionalized away.

Hocus Pocus poster

Yeah Right!2003

Not Powell Peralta, but skate cinema at its artistic peak: a gallery of athletes doing impossible things with genuine visual poetry. Shows what the form became in the hands of visionary directors.

But It's deliberately paced and experimental. If you want tricks and energy, the long philosophical passages will frustrate you.

Yeah Right! poster

Mad Max 21981

Both films are about how people create meaning and community through dangerous physical activity in spaces nobody wants them in.

The same anarchic, kinetic storytelling in a post-apocalyptic desert instead of California parking lots. Both are about small crews improvising survival and style in hostile spaces. Pure movement, minimal plot, total commitment to a vision.

But It's violent and bleak. If you're seeking skateboarding joy, this inverts the emotional register entirely—same machinery, opposite destination.

Mad Max 2 poster

After Hours1985

Both use a journey through a landscape as an excuse to introduce wild characters and obstacles. Both are less interested in destination than in the texture of the traveling itself.

Scorsese's surreal New York odyssey: a hero wandering through increasingly absurd encounters in a single night, the real world getting weirder and weirder. Same narrative structure as Animal Chin—a quest through a landscape populated by eccentric characters—but draped in noir paranoia instead of skateboard joy.

But It's a solo protagonist's nightmare, not a crew's adventure. The comedy is darker and meaner, and nothing gets resolved.

After Hours poster

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