Since Dreamworks animation was taken over by Fox, they announced a big and exciting slate that was a mixture of sequels to good films and interesting sounding new material. The quality of Rise of The Guardians and Madagascar 3, following in the footsteps of How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda 2 led some animation fans, this one included, to hope for Pixar levels of creativity and consistency. The Croods, the first film to be released under the new partnership, arrived with a certain level of expectation; could this be the start of a new era for Dreamworks? Well, if it is, it’s a slow, unremarkable one.
The Croods are one of the last surviving cavemen families, living in fear and believing that this fear keeps them alive. One day their cave is destroyed, and they have to explore the outside world to try and find another cave. Young, progressive Homo Sapiens Guy (Ryan Reynolds) manages to persuade the Neanderthals to move to higher ground, to avoid the impending tectonic shifts that will change the face of the world forever. Grug (Nicholas Cage) doesn’t trust Guy or, indeed, anything. His daughter Eep (Emma Stone), however, embraces the chance for adventure and spending time with Guy. What follows is yet another film about male insecurity, framed in a beautifully animated world with hybrid animals and colourful alien landscapes.
The problem, as several critics have already observed, is one of comparison. The prehistorically inaccurate setting is trying desperately not to be Ice Age, whilst the plot follows an arc ripped straight from How To Train Your Dragon. The driving relationship of the plot is, once more, a father and their child struggling to understand each other, and the final scene feels awfully familiar. There’s a sense that we’ve seen it all before, a feeling exacerbated by the uninspired voice work. A brick-subtle script that heavily signposts major themes makes it difficult to care about yet another family that have to learn to work together; Dragons and The Incredibles did the same thing a lot better. There’s no big emotional or transcendent moment here, it’s far more pedestrian than that.
The character animation is, quite frankly, awful. The blank eyes and textureless skin feel like a Saturday morning cartoon or a Playstation 2 game. Compare a character like Guy to Brave’s Merida, or even North from Rise of the Guardians, and The Croods is undeniably lacking. In a film from a studio this rich and talented, such ugliness in character design is incredibly disappointing, but also baffling.
And yet The Croods still manages to be a thoroughly entertaining adventure, packed with thankfully pop-culture-free laughs. Some of the jokes are undeniably naff â the irritating, kid-friendly sloth is the worst culprit here â but for every dud there are a couple of big hits. In abandoning any kind of realism, the film makers have clearly had a lot of fun in playing around with stereotypical ideas about cavemen, mining laughs from the invention of shoes, prehistoric photography and the dangers of tectonic plates. The family’s attempts at surviving and inventing things in a hostile world are consistently funny, and children will certainly find lots to enjoy.
The film’s biggest appeal, however, is the world it is set in. This is not earth as we know it, and The Croods features some of the best, most outrageous landscape and creature design that animation has to offer. Turtle birds, flying piranha and multicoloured, misshapen tigers are just some of the bizarre, brilliant animals that inhabit the jungles and deserts they explore. My personal favourite are Siamese lemurs, joined at the tail â what possible evolutionary advantage could that offer? The landscapes are equally fun, bright, colourful and totally rejecting realism to surprise the audience with each new terrain they cross. When the family split up to work their way through a maze of rocks in the film’s most beautiful sequence, The Croods shows its potential, frustrating us with a glimpse of what it could have been.
There’s lots to enjoy about to enjoy about The Croods, but it’s a shame that in a world this inventively created, the story couldn’t have been just a little bit bolder.
Animation Confabulation 
The Animation Commendation
I’m really not looking forward to this, “Turbo”, or “Mr. Peabody and Sherman” or whatever it’s called.
Nathanael Smith
Yeah, can’t say anything about Peabody but Turbo looks fairly lame…
Cassi
I’m not sure what you mean by “textureless” skin, though. Seriously, go google a screenshot of any of the characters and you’ll find that the skin textures are easily en par with those from Rise of The Guardians or How to Train Your Dragon. There are not only freckles, but pores and dirt on the character’s skin. As for comparing it to the skin in Brave, just… have you ever even watched Brave? There’s a lot about that film that’s incredibly stunning and detailed, but the skin texture is most definately not. It’s a smooth, passible matte that doesn’t look bad per se, but certainly does not deserve to be held up as an example for detailed skin texture because, well, it isn’t. At all. Like seriously, The Croods beats the living daylights out of Brave on the skin texture front. Again, I advise you to utilize the resources at your disposal and perform a simple google search to see if I’m wrong. It also kind comes across as though you’re not really familiar with the difference between poor design and “ugly” design. I assure you that there is nothing wrong with characters being “ugly” in a film about zany, clueless cavemen, particularly when said “ugliness” marks a brief and welcome departure from the polished and homogenized prettiness of most female characters in animation these days. Not only do the characters have distinct sillouettes and color palettes, but they also boast a certain kind of caricature in body type as well as facial structure that reminds the audience that, hey, these guys are cavemen. They’re stocky and have broad shoulders. They can lift heavy boulders and run on all fours. Their forheads are small and sloping and their skin is gritty. They’re not super smart and they rarely bathe. Hair product hasn’t been invented yet so their hair’s pretty messy. And above all this, they’re living in a highly exaggerated, caricatured, humorous version of prehistory, so it only follows that they as characters should look like exaggerated, caricatured, and humorous cavepeople, ugliness and all. Honestly, I would have been massively dissappointed in the design crew if they’d gone with designs that were any prettier or less wacky than the ones they ended up using. They really would have just looked out of place at best and downright dull at worst. Seriously, maybe it’s a stylistic choice that didn’t work for you, but as someone who actually studies character design, there’s nothing more frustrating than people treating perfectly good character design as “wrong” because it didn’t fit easily enough into a certain standard of beauty. “Ugly” character design is so stinken important, both from an aesthetic perspective, and from a social perspective. Lastly, I’ve been comparing gifs from both Brave and The Croods, and the level of detail and smoothness in movement is actually really, really similar. The main differences I see are purely stylistic; Brave is more streamlined and traditional, whereas The Croods includes a lot of the subtleties and idiosyncracies that make real life movement so entertaining. They’re both extremely good. They’re both really detailed. They both serve their purposes well. Again, this feels like more of a failure of research/observation than an actual criticism. (Also, how are their eyes blank?) Look, I agree with most of what you’ve said here about the story and the humor, and I think this is overall a really good review. But… I don’t know… It just kind of came across like you wrote it before checking to make sure that what you were recalling was actually correct and not a product of preconcieved notions or romanticised memories. And it’s like, I do that too, you know? Sometimes I’ll go back and look at things I’ve written and realise I got something totally wrong because I was relying to heavily on my memory alone. I just think it’s really important that we don’t make these mistakes when we publicly critique and compare art. People pour their souls into this work, they really do. And it’s crucial that, when we criticize something they could have done better or compare it to another work that we feel handled it better, that we double and triple-check both our research and the memories and preconcieved notions we may be working off of. Really, I’m still struggling to wrap my head around the whole ‘comparing skin texture unfavorably to that of Brave’ thing, but…eh. Anyway, thanks for the review. You hit a lot things on the head nonetheless. Keep doing what you’re doing.
Nathanael Smith
Hi, did you work on the film? This is a very comprehensive (and defensive) answer, which is great! I love it when people defend stuff passionately. The only thing is, I can’t reply with any strength of feeling as I only saw the film once and have had no desire to return to it.
One thing though, I agree that ugly character design is important – it’s what I love Laika for – so I don’t know what I meant here. It must have been ugly for different reasons, as not inherent in their design. And I distinctly remember being unimpressed with their skin textures. But that’s about all I remember from my response. It was a long time ago…
Cassi
Naw, I didn’t work on the film. I’m just really passionate about cgi skin textures, so tend to pay a lot of attention to that when I watch animated films. Anyway, sorry that came across as so defensive. It wasn’t my intention. And yeah, Laika’ s character design is pretty stellar. Glad to find another fan! Again, thanks for the review.