While I enjoyed the first two Shrek movies, it was with the films Kung Fu Panda (2008) and How to Train Your Dragon (2010) that Dreamworks Animation convinced me that when it came to heart and narrative heft, they were fully capable of matching the product of rival Pixar, especially when the latter stumbled with creative disappointments like Cars 2 or even last year's Brave.
Their new film The Croods, their first to be distributed by former rival Twentieth Century Fox (which produced animated films like the Ice Age series), is not quite in the league of Dreamworks' best, but it does have quite a few of the ingredients that made their best as special as they were, starting with a lot of heart.
The Croods are a family of neanderthals whose patriarch, Grug (voiced by Nicolas Cage), lives in constant fear of the extremely hostile world they inhabit. In a brief prologue, after all, it is explained that every other caveman family living around them has been eaten, stomped, or otherwise killed by one wild animal or another, and as a result Grug is cautious to a fault if only to ensure his family's survival. He lives in constant fear, and encourages his family to adopt the same attitude.
Unfortunately for Grug, his eldest daughter, Eep (voiced by Emma Stone) is as curious as Grug is paranoid, and she longs to see the outside world and all its perils, even if it means leaving the safety of her family's cave, where Grug seals them up at night with a huge rock to keep out predators. One night Eep sees a strange light just outside the cave and follows it, only to find, at the trail's end, that it actually came from a torch which was lit by another human, a member of a more advanced species of man, named Guy (Ryan Reynolds). Guy tells Eep that the end of the world is coming, and he is on his way to the sun.
After Guy saves the Croods from a flock of ravenous birds using fire, Grug decides they need him and keeps him around as they make their way from their home to safety. When Guy's clever and useful inventions and inexhaustible optimism, which stand in stark contrast to Grug's utter lack of imagination and eternal pessimism, start winning the family over, the Croods start looking more and more to him as a leader, at the expense of Grug, who is not pleased. Not only that, but the growing affection between Eep, his firstborn, and Guy, grates on him constantly. Whereas Grug's bedtime stories for the families are about death and promoting fear of the unknown, Guy enchants them with stories of "tomorrow."
Of course, if the Croods and Guy are going to live to see "tomorrow," they have got to work together, considering the number of things around that could kill them, like the piranha-like birds, the giant saber-toothed tiger, and the collapsing landscape itself.
Apart from some really delightful visuals, which are sort of a cross between Ice Age and Avatar, the movie benefits from some really engaging performances from the voice actors, especially Cage, whose backwards-thinking Grug was good for quite a lot of belly laughs throughout the film. The father-daughter dynamic between Grug and Eep, which is one of the central tenets of the movie, was as appropriately awkward as relationships often are between fathers and their teenage daughters, but not as well-written as I feel it should have been, even though the people involved were neanderthals. Stone's and Cage's definitely invested in their performances, but neither the script nor chemistry was up to the task. Even less so was the romantic chemistry between Stone's Eep and Reynold's Guy, but this is a family film, so I suppose it's easy to forgive the lackluster scripting in this instance. Also, this film is called "The Croods" and not "Eep and Guy."
Chris Sanders, who co-created Lilo and Stitch before defecting to Dreamworks and creating the sensational How to Train Your Dragon, doesn't quite reach the heights of those former films in terms of heart, but the unconventional choice of characters is something that's still a lot of fun to watch. It just doesn't quite have the crossover appeal that both of his previous two films had. I imagine most adults will be happy to sit through this film, as I was, but I doubt it will engage them the way Dreamworks' better films have been able to do.
One collaborator whose work really stood out for me was composer Alan Silvestri, whose score for this movie was a cut above most of the scores I hear in Dreamworks animated films and even in a number of Pixar films; at times Silvestri even channeled the vibe of industry legend John Williams, who to my knowledge has never scored an animated film.
This isn't my favorite film from Dreamworks Animation, but it is certainly a welcome recovery in form after they disappointed somewhat with the tepid Rise of the Guardians a few months back. No need to catch it in 3-D.
4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment