The Croods
With his third animated feature, co-writer and co-director Chris Sanders has confirmed his status as one of the great storytellers in modern animation. Admittedly, “The Croods” lacks the overall excellence of “Lilo & Stitch” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” but this prehistoric family comedy carries a lot of the same, narrative DNA of those two instant classics.
As with “Stitch” and “Dragon,” Sanders is telling the story of an outsider who doesn’t conform to society’s held beliefs of how the world works; they see things just a little different. In “Croods,” that role belongs to Eep (Emma Stone), the eldest daughter of Grug (Nicolas Cage, in his most engaging performance since “Kick-Ass”), a caveman who is keeping his family alive by doing what cavemen do: hiding in caves; not going out at night; and not interacting with anything new. But times are changing, and Eep leads the way, when she sneaks out of the cave, chasing a moving light, that turns out to be a torch used by Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who is a little further along the evolutionary scale than Eep and her family. He knows that the world as they know it is changing, and the only way for the Croods to survive is to change with it. But Grug resists, even when the rest of his family starts to embrace the possibilities in front of them.
Sanders, who co-wrote and directed this film with Kirk De Micco, isn’t just a thematically strong storyteller, but a visual one, which is– of course –essential when you’re discussing the world of animation. On that front, it wasn’t long into “The Croods” when I started to wish I had seen the film for the first time in 3D, because Sanders’s staging and camerawork, as it did in “Dragon,” beg for the process. As with both “Stitch” and “Dragon,” “The Croods” represents the “state-of-the-art” in animation, with some of the most beautiful, remarkable images ever created in the art form, as well as some striking, original character design to go with the pre-historic setting. That the human characters don’t look quite like modern humans in animated films shouldn’t be a surprise, and the more square features fit nicely with the jagged, rock-like aesthetic Sanders and his team of animators work in. Amazingly enough, this is actually the first Dreamworks Animation film I’ve seen in theatres since the last “Shrek” movie in 2010, and believe me when I say that I feel like I caught up at a time when the studio is at its artistic peak. True, the film goes for easy jokes (as most family films do, nowadays), but it’s impossible not to get caught up in the emotional components of the story thanks to this great cast, and a team of artists (including Alan Silvestri, who contributes a fantastic score) committed to doing more than just entertaining us, but in making us feel something we can identify with. Once again, Chris Sanders and co. succeeded brilliantly with me.
