Cast: Nicolas Cage, Ryan Reynolds, Emma Stone
Director: Kirk De Micco, Chris Sanders
Country: USA
Genre: Animation | Adventure | Comedy | Family
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: The Croods is out on Blu-ray and DVD on October 1st. Special Features include ‘The Croodaceous Creatures of Croods’, ‘Belt’s Cave Journal, and Croods’ Cuts (Lost Scenes).
In a highly competitive animation feature film industry, recently coming up trumps alongside the masterful giants Disney and Pixar, Dreamworks is now one of the key players. In the stakes of big production values each studio has a recognisable style that’s quick to spot in the imagery of the feature and often in narrative layout, both largely obvious to audiences within the opening few seconds of the teaser trailer. For me the striking uniqueness of Dreamworks’ animated films is the attention to detail in the smaller background characters, the jokes aimed at the broadest of audience demographics (i.e. slapstick usually features for the youngest targets, witty puns for the adults and cultural or social references for the teens). Without being too niche on topics for narrative or sticking with singular audience targets, Dreamworks has cemented the family market as a clear favourite in my books.
Without being too niche on topics for narrative or sticking with singular audience targets, Dreamworks has cemented the family market as a clear favourite in my books.
The Croods follows the world’s first family as they journey across new lands after their cave home is destroyed. The prehistoric world on film and TV has been a major genre since my humble discovery of it with the cartoon caper classic animated series The Flintstones by Hanna Barbera. Classics that spring to mind are Jurassic Park (1993) and One Million Years B.C. (1966), but my love of the genre comes from the Don Bluth animation The Land Before Time that as a child I seemed to watch endlessly on VHS. Recently 20th Century Fox has had huge success with the now trilogy Ice Age, that started at the turn of the ice age where the woolly mammoth reigned supreme and the last instalment unearthed dinosaurs. The Croods was a complete thrill in respect of the genre as it distinctly takes in all possible sources and without making has references left, right and centre which is had the opportunity to do. Owing to genre is difficult to regulate and thankfully the Dreamworks team takes to this project with the wide eyed love of creativity. What emerges from the genre influences are very succinct landscapes and characters that belong to an entirely new prehistoric world.
The new edge largely consists of creative colouring and a renewed flexibility of the creature’s range of animated performance within the narrative. There are a few gems included that really bring out a sense of exploration and wonder as the narrative progresses and the landscapes contextually change.
A collage of mixed animal parts similarly though up in the style of a young imagination are the basic blueprint for all the prehistoric creatures our cave-family meet along the way through the strange exotic places they pass through. A mad combination of things, like hyenas and lizards or dogs and crocodiles, have been blended together Pokémon style to develop the notion of a different sort of take on prehistoric life forms. Regular and recognisable monsters like the sabre tooth tiger appear with a new edge, giving a familiar feel to the genre focus. The new edge largely consists of creative colouring and a renewed flexibility of the creature’s range of animated performance within the narrative. There are a few gems included that really bring out a sense of exploration and wonder as the narrative progresses and the landscapes contextually change. Anything from the downright dangerously deadly carnivore to the spectacularly weird fluffy things, are represented in the flamboyant array of zoological specimens. Much love has gone into their design, but a lot of sweat has gone into their animation. The movement of each creature is a mix of the basic movement pattern of the real life animals they are a mash-up of. With this, each creature is a bizarre combination of features that have no natural connection, throw on top of that an essence of stylistic formatting and suddenly you have this quite remarkable end product with a huge variety of emotional impact that reflects positively on the narrative content.
As far as box office figures are concerned I believe this was a pretty mediocre release in theatres, although it did get a global theatrical release which shows not just that the studio had money to market the production, but that they believed in the universal appeal of the feature. In so far as this, I see it as a successful venture that brought a bit of genre devotion back to life with an overwhelming sense of confidence, happily transferred as a treat for the eyes.
[notification type=”star”]70/100 ~ GOOD. The Croods is a successful venture that brought a bit of genre devotion back to life with an overwhelming sense of confidence, happily transferred as a treat for the eyes.[/notification]
