The Croods is a
breathlessly imaginative caveman story that needs less caveman and more of everything
else. I’ve always championed fewer talking-animal movies in theaters, but
here’s one where that formula might have offered an improvement.
The Cro-Magnon humans, our primordial ancestors, who star in this
DreamWorks Animation movie are just so very odd — their shapes, their voices,
their hair, their endless chatter — although I did like how the grandma
cavewoman wore a little muumuu made out of lizard skin, and how her son-in-law
was constantly plotting her demise to saber-toothed bunnies. Yes, apparently the joke about the mother-in-law is a million years old.
The Croods takes place
a million or so years ago, in the cradle of civilization, where bipedaling
humans are mingling with the owners of all those bones in our museums, as well
as some creatures that never made it to museums, including our friend the
saber-toothed bunny, ancestor to Arizona ’s
famous jackalope perhaps.
In the opening credits, a variety of cave families are rendered
extinct by the local bestiary and fauna. In response to all the natural
selection around them, pre-nuclear family the Croods decide to live life in
absolute terror in a dusty cave. Their motto is simply “fear everything.” Crood
patriarch Grug (Nicolas Cage), a well-meaning but fear-mongering father, lets
his family out every day for some exercise, some dinner and then it’s back in
the cave to fear another day. This routine does not go over so well with the
rest of the family, including daughter Eep (Emma Stone), who only wishes to
explore the dinosaur-infested landscape — a Jurassic park, if you will — and to
live life free of boundaries.
Eventually, their cave is destroyed and the Croods — Grug and
wife Ugga, daughter Eep, son Thunk and grandma Maw Maw — are sent scampering
into the great unknown with a shirtless Patrick Swayze look-alike named Guy,
who has somehow figured out that the continents must be shifting and the only
way to survive the exploding lava is to migrate to an area that will eventually
become Bermuda. So, Croods in tow, Guy, with a belt made of living sloth, heads
out to find something they have abstractly named “tomorrow.”
Their journey is gorgeously colored, with buckets of paint
drenching the screen in dripping gobs of color. It looks like candy,
deliciously mixed up and thrown together for a film that’s begging us to get a
cavity. For the love of Darwin ,
don’t see this movie in 3-D, a gimmick that will only dim the picture and those
glorious hues. As wondrous as the colors are, the creature design is even
better, with a large cast of inventive animals that are far, far, far removed
from Origin of the Species and
paleontology textbooks. Each new prehistoric creature is a marvel for the
film’s inspired animation: mouse elephants, turtle-shelled birds, kitten bears,
whale cows, alligator ostriches, flower-headed frogs, skunk badgers named
Douglas, giant swamp llamas, piranha parrots, feathery cats, conjoined tree
squirrels and our saber-toothed bunny, if not the star of the movie then this
review. Even the little belted sloth was a magical little creation; the
children in the audience howled when he unbuckled his three-toed feet and mimed
dialogue.
All of this wonder and awe does not carry over to the Croods, who
are forgettably animated and poorly voiced. Cage is simply the wrong choice for
voice work: his nasally stammer doesn’t suit the barrel-chested caveman that is
Ugg. Never at any point did I stop seeing Cage pantomiming behind a studio
microphone and start hearing Grug; the voice simply didn’t match the character,
and Grug’s omnipresent chattering over everyone else’s lines doesn’t help. Emma
Stone as Eep is better, as is the great Cloris Leachman (this year’s Betty
White) playing the grandma.
But then there’s the issue of Eep’s body design, which is just bizarre.
She’s supposed to be a teen, but she’s very booby, with big, thick arms and
legs, but dainty little hands and feet. It’s all very strange looking. Her hair
is a George Washington-like mushroom of frizz that seems to be stuck in place.
Pixar movies reinvent digital hair with each new picture — Sully’s fur in Monster’s Inc., or Merida ’s red locks in Brave — yet here is a hairdo made of granite with no physics to its
movement or bounce. Adding insult to injury, at one point Eep is given what are
essentially a pair of prehistoric Ugg boots, proving that no one in a billion
years has ever looked good in a pair.
It’s unlikely your children will care about all this, but they
aren’t going to drive themselves to the theater, which means you’re watching
this, too, and I think you’re going to be struck by how bizarre Eep looks and
Grug sounds. All that being said, though, there are some interesting character
moments in The Croods. I did like the
hand motif that turns up over and over again. Hand prints are lining cave
walls, hands stretch upward to touch the last beam of setting sunlight, and
hands are used to show that metaphorical reach we all make for our own
tomorrows. It’s a symbolic visual theme that is carried throughout the film,
and it’s a nice touch — pun certainly intended. One scene, involving pet Douglas, has a twist so macabre and unexpected that only the adults will appreciate its simple setup and brutal payoff.
Other scenes don't ring with so much detail or humor. There's an opening bit with the Croods stealing a creature's egg. I couldn't help but think the egg-stealing, nest-defiling cave-family would be villains in a slightly different version of the same scene. Anyway, so off they go to steal the egg and they all treat it like a big football game, with even poor granny hurdling over animals and tossing the big yolky breakfast around as each and every character is reduced to an action trope, even a baby, whose only role in the film is to be turned loose on unsuspecting victims of the Croods' crudeness. When they aren't killing bird fetuses, the Croods are usually toting poor Guy around as he's wedged in a hollow log because they've decided he's some sort of threat. I don't think the makers of the film knew how to frame the family. They are either too stupid for their own good, or just time fillers for the spreading continents. Even Eep, a character another movie would cast as the intelligent heroine, is often reduced to a mindless proxy for her overbearing father who fears everything. She has no sparkle, no wit and certainly not enough curiosity to justify her close-mindedness to Guy's oncoming adventure. She's simply not written as a strong, independent female, no matter what that leopard-printed micro-mini says.
I’m very curious how American parents will explain the The Croods' time period and setting to their children: they’ll
slant it toward science or toward religion. Either the film takes place a
million years ago, in a utopia of unmitigated natural selection and Darwinism;
or 4,000 years ago, in a post-Eden, pre-Flood land populated by a variety of
creatures who will eventually miss the memo about lining up for Noah’s Ark. DreamWorks Animation deserves some commendation for staging a
movie in a time period that might make children ask their parents for
historical clarification. We need children asking those questions. After all,
this is a country that still can’t agree on climate change, evolution and the
age of Earth and here’s a movie that ponders all three inside the colorful guts
of a plucky CGI version of The Flintstones.
It’s not the best animated movie you’ll see this year, but The Croods will certainly make you smile as its rainbow of color
sparkles from the screen. And then you can explain to your kids how science is for schools, religion is for churches and saber-toothed bunnies are for movie theaters.
