The Croods

 

No, The Croods is not as forgettable as Escape From Planet Earth, but in a lot of ways, it's much more disappointing.  It's simple, really.  Escape From Planet Earth was a low budget quickie that no one had much faith in.  The Croods is a big, beautiful, lavish Dreamworks Animation production that looks great (as most CG cartoons do), but is saddled with a weak script, a meandering narrative, and characters we don't care a whole lot about.

The film was co-written and co-directed by Chris Sanders, who is best known for creating Lilo and Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon.  Those are both wonderful films, filled with wit and characters that endear themselves to us.  What happened here, I don't know.  The movie suffers from a complete lack of focus.  It's simply a series of stale visual gags and weak vignettes looking for a purpose.  It's also often far too frantic, with the characters constantly running away from some kind of danger or hazard in almost every scene.  It gets exhausting.  It also keeps the characters constantly at a distance to us, since the movie seldom slows down long enough for us to get to know them.  It doesn't take long for the film's cast of CG cartoon characters to start resembling video game characters, running and fighting off dangerous creatures.

The Croods are a family of cavemen struggling to survive in a harsh prehistoric world.  All they know is that they are the last of their kind.  There used to be lots of other cavemen around, but they died out, either by attack from prehistoric creature, or disease.  The Croods have managed to avoid extinction by seldom leaving their cave.  The overly protective father of the family, Grug (voice by Nicolas Cage), makes sure that no one in his family ever ventures outside by telling them horrible stories of what happens to cavemen who are curious, and venture beyond the safety of the cave.  Most of the family abides by these rules, except for fiery teenage daughter, Eep (Emma Stone), who wants to explore the outside world.  The other members of the Crood clan include sweetly bland mother Ugga (Catherine Keener), feisty grandmother Gran (Cloris Leachman), and dim-witted son Thunk (Clark Duke).

One night, Eep decides to leave the cave without permission, and comes across a more intelligent and evolved form of human who calls himself Guy (Ryan Reynolds).  Guy has already mastered fire, invented shoes for his feet, and tells Eep of the world beyond the cave.  More than that, he tells her that the world is changing, and that they need to head for higher ground in order to be safe.  Sure enough, the continents begin to drift and change shortly thereafter, and the Croods' cave is destroyed in the process.  Now the whole family has no choice but to follow Guy to a new world so that they can evolve like he has.  That's pretty much the whole plot right there, as the remainder of the film are a bunch of visual gags concerning the Croods making new discoveries of the world, creating failed inventions, or being confronted by some kind of strange prehistoric beast.  You know, I don't require a big plot in a children's animated film, but it's at least nice if the plot feels like it's going somewhere.  This one drags its feet to no real destination in particular.

The Croods is supposed to be a journey of discovery for its characters.  Grug the father must learn to take chances, and discover how to let his teenage daughter find her own way in life.  Eep discovers feelings for Guy as they travel together.  And so on.  These ideas are established, but never really explored, because the movie never slows down long enough to let us get to know them.  Grug's revelations are cheap and automatic, and happen as plot contrivance, rather than character development.  As for Eep and Guy, they seem to fall for each other because we expect them to.  The movie seldom gives them a moment alone, or a scene of dialogue where the two discover they are kindred spirits.  This is a generic script where things happen out of necessity, not because of relationships.

But hey, at least you get some beautiful visuals to distract you from the fact that there's not much of anything going on.  Provided you see the movie in 2D.  Like every other animated feature to come out these days, the movie is being released in 3D, where the glasses mute the colors, and make everything appear murky and brown.  Simply by taking off those dumb glasses at anytime, you can see the vivid art and color that went into making this.  Once again, audiences are being asked to pay a bigger ticket price for lesser picture quality.  I would think audiences would have wised up by now, but apparently not.  Regardless, there are some beautifully rendered scenes here, and I liked the unique designs of the various creatures that the Croods encounter.  Not that those details make this movie worth seeing.

 

For all of its hype and big production values, The Croods is a surprisingly chintzy production.  It's not particularly funny, most of the capable voice cast are wasted in underwritten roles, and nothing up on the screen resonates.  It's something audiences expect from a cheap animation house, not the studio who brought us the Kung Fu Panda films.  Dreamworks has been making some pretty big strides in animation lately, but this is a big step back.

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