Chris Sanders
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…in places it gets highly reminiscent of both The Wild Robot (2024) and Pom Poko (1994)…
It’s no Hundreds of Beavers, but Hoppers still plays like the hilariously caffeinated offspring of The Wild Robot and Teen Titans Go!.
Will and I disagree a bit on where it lands, especially once The Wild Robot enters the conversation.
In this respect there’s glimpses of recent Dreamworks adventure The Wild Robot, a similarly ecologically minded story featuring a zany critter cast…
Similarly to 2024’s The Wild Robot, Hoppers gets a bit cutesy with its talking animal community, showing predator and prey all being friendly with each other…
In the vein of Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot, the film captures the overlap between aiming to help with technology and embracing the natural world and its processes.
…one that begins the film with an opening copycatting The Wild Robot…
…an opening copycatting The Wild Robot, there also exists a shipwrecked container full of new “Hi-Tech Edition” Buzz Lightyear dolls…
You might think the scenes are stolen directly from another animated feature, the 2024 “The Wild Robot.”
…surviving a crash like the Wild Robot and then journeying into the world…
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Directed by Tim Burton
influenced The Call of the Wild (2020)
Visuals Themes
This isn’t quite Andy Serkis-level motion capture brilliance ala Planet of the Apes , but you often forget that Buck is a CGI creation throughout thanks to the trick-of-the-mind the film manages.
The final triumph of dog-kind in the film recalls, of all things, Matt Reeves's superlative Planet of the Apes trilogy, postulating a future in which hyper-intelligent, non-human mammals inherit the earth.
Special mention must also be given to actor Terry Notary who was the motion capture reference for Buck, and much like he’s done in the past playing Kong in Kong: Skull Island and Rocket in all three of the recent Planet of the Apes adventures, he adds a layer of emotional authenticity that’s outstanding.
Accomplished motion-capture performer Terry Notary, known for his work on the most recent “Planet of the Apes” films and a thrilling and terrifying ape-inspired performance art piece in “The Square,” brings Buck’s movements to life, and it’s a truly skilled performance.
Terry Notary, the movement coach who taught actors how to mimic simians on the recent “Planet of the Apes” films, played the dog on the set before animation, in what the film bills as a “live action reference performance.”
In the recent Planet of the Apes reboot, the motion capture simians were an ethical alternative to real apes, who shouldn't be exploited for human entertainment.
The Croods evokes the memories of The Flintstones, in which gags transposed the post-war American life of cars, hair-dryers and phonographs onto the Stone Age.
There is a long and undistinguished tradition of comic-strips and films set in prehistoric times, including Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit in Knockout during the 1940s, The Flintstones on TV in the 1960s, the dire 1981 Hollywood feature film Caveman starring Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach, and now the animated The Croods .
Directors Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders seem hell-bent on avoiding "The Flintstones" comparisons, creating an environment that's closer to James Cameron 's "Avatar" world than the Paleolithic era audiences are used to.
Basically, it’s a mashup of “The Flintstones” and “The Land Before Time.”
Forget The Flintstones — this is more like Ice Age with humans.
For everyone who loved The Flintstones, but didn’t find it depressingly conventional and conservative enough.
Not a chance, as long as the greenery, red fluttering insect swarms, and various increasingly tedious creature chases look so much like copycat retreads of 2009's " Avatar ."
Directors Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders seem hell-bent on avoiding "The Flintstones" comparisons, creating an environment that's closer to James Cameron 's "Avatar" world than the Paleolithic era audiences are used to.
There are eye-popping allusions to “Avatar” and jaw-dropping sequences of cataclysmic clouds of rubble that rival any of the animation we’ve seen recently.
As in Avatar, we have an unique landscape housing an otherwise ordinary story.
Amazingly, if you’re looking for a visual cinematic comparison to “The Croods” you’d have to first mention “Life of Pi” or “Avatar”.
The freshness comes in the Technicolor world - think "Avatar" for kids - that the family encounters.
Much like 1995’s Babe , Buck is given humanistic traits (physical reactions, expressions, etc) that often push the boundary of believability (at one point he convinces Harrison Ford’s gruff, isolated traveller John Thornton to give up drinking), but seeing as how some of the situations Michael Green’s script calls for would be near impossible with an actual dog – animal-on-animal violence, human-on-animal violence, the drastic weather conditions of the icy Canadian setting – the CGI decision, distracting as it may be, makes sense; plus, following the backlash A Dog’s Purpose managed when footage of its animals being mistreated went public, The Call of the Wild ‘s decision is all the more sound.
Although some films with talking four-legged friends - like “Babe” (1995), “The Lion King” (2019) or even “The Cat from Outer Space” (1978) - have a nestled place in moviedom, thankfully in “The Call of the Wild”, the computer-constructed pooches - including our sympathetic hero - behave like dogs and aren’t asking one other, “Hey, when will we break for dinner?”
It gets to the point where they let Cage off his leash (never a good idea) and do this bit where Grug tries to be a thinker like Guy, only Cage sounds like he’s trying to channel Jeff Bridges in “ The Big Lebowski .”
This is strictly a toon tale for the whole family, meaning that anyone on the lookout for a comeback by Fritz the Cat creator Ralph Bakshi (MIA since 1997) will have to keep waiting and hoping.
For Sanders, the benchmark of organic animated forests was set by Tyrus Wong’s animated backgrounds in Disney’s Bambi and the painted backgrounds of Hayao Miyazaki in My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, and that is what the art style of The Wild Robot aspired to.
There is a long and undistinguished tradition of comic-strips and films set in prehistoric times, including Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit in Knockout during the 1940s, The Flintstones on TV in the 1960s, the dire 1981 Hollywood feature film Caveman starring Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach, and now the animated The Croods .
The dialogue isn’t much here – some teenage jokes, ribbing of Crood father Grug (spoken by Nicholas Cage) by his wife (Catherine Keener) and mother (Cloris Leachman), and a hapless fat son lifted from King Of The Hill (Clark Duke).
It's enough to convince Grug to join up with Guy on the road to a mystical mountain straight out of Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings , though their final destination looks more like Cabo.
It doesn’t completely succeed in either regard, but Home does give off a curiously dinky vibe, as if DreamWorks—which shunted the film from its original November 2014 release date to make room for the first Penguins Of Madagascar movie—prematurely gave up on the idea that Home could stand alongside the company’s animated franchise-starters like How To Train Your Dragon, the Madagascar series, and even The Croods, which currently has a sequel and TV series in the offing.
By that metric, Home seems, at first, like their best feature since The Croods .
She also represents DreamWorks Animation’s third female protagonist, the others starring in Monsters vs. Aliens and The Croods.
The adaptation of Jack London's 1903 novel is part of a mini-boom of Lit 101 adaptations, coming after the $200 million success of Little Women and before upcoming versions of Jane Austen's Emma and Charles Dickens' David Copperfield.
The typical modern animated feature spends so much time and energy reminding parents and kids that they love each other that it creates the impression that families today are especially fragile and needy -- or certainly much more so than in the decades that produced "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "The Jungle Book."
The Croods include family leader Grug, dense son Thunk and our heroine Eep, a Cro-Magnon version of Jennifer Grey from "Dirty Dancing."
How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Directed by Dean DeBlois
influenced The Call of the Wild (2020), The Wild Robot (2024), The Croods (2013)
Visuals
Relying on the same fusion seen in the hybrid live-action/animation versions of The Jungle Book and The Lion King, director Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon) sometimes veers toward a Disneyfication of the source material, with souped-up, special-effects-laden stunts and lots of kooky canine slapstick.
Whilst director Chris Sanders ( Lilo & Stitch , How to Train Your Dragon ) does indeed put the dog in question (Buck) in perilous situations, and it would be best noted that the violence in some scenes suggests physical abuse towards said dog too (the material is perhaps a bit too distressing for younger viewers), the evolution of Buck as a character outweighs any of the could-be-traumatic material.
That’s because “The Call of the Wild,” directed by Chris Sanders (the co-director, with Dean DeBlois, of “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Lilo & Stitch”), is a semi-live-action film that nevertheless bounces along with the glibly overdone visual logic of an old Disney dog comedy from the 1960s.
This is Sanders’ live-action directorial debut after the filmmaker cut his teeth co-directing Disney’s Lilo & Stitch and DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon to critical acclaim.
Sometimes director Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon) plays it safe where he shouldn’t have, though.
This is Sanders’s live-action debut, having made a name for himself in the animation world with films like Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon .
Writer-directors Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders - the latter directed "How to Train Your Dragon" and co-directed "Lilo & Stitch" - don't rely on anachronistic humor and pop-culture references, opting mostly for kid-friendly jokes and exciting but not-too-frightening action.
The DreamWorks film, from writer/directors Chris Sanders ("How to Train Your Dragon," "Lilo & Stitch") and Kirk Di Micco ("Space Chimps"), features a starry voice cast in Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener, Cloris Leachman and Clark Duke, and an appropriately high concept: the Croods are a family of cavemen who have to evolve suddenly when faced with cataclysmic natural disasters and the arrival of a young Homo Sapiens with the ability to make fire.
And so thereby we solve a small mystery, which had been: What happens when you pair up the writer and director of the dire Space Chimps -- that would be Kirk De Micco -- with Chris Sanders, the writer and director of the glorious How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch ?
Thankfully, that’s not the case where co-writer/director Chris Sanders is concerned, as his work on “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Lilo & Stitch” is completely indicative of the experience you’ll have with “ The Croods ,” which is to say a supremely positive one.
The animation is first rate, even if the cutesy critters bear the hallmarks of co-director Chris Sanders’ “Lilo & Stitch” and “How to Train Your Dragon” – wide, round faces, big cuddly eyes.
Despite the fact that I hold Chris Sanders’ Lilo & Stitch (2002) in the highest esteem and think highly of his How to Train Your Dragon (2010), I was not looking forward to this.
Lin-Manuel Miranda stars in animated musical Vivo , written and directed by The Croods ’ Kirk DeMicco and co-directed by Brandon Jeffords.
Written by Quiara Alegria Hudes (Miranda's collaborator on "In the Heights" ), and directed by Kirk DeMicco ("The Croods") and co-director Brandon Jeffords, "Vivo" comes from Sony's animation arm, which produced the "Hotel Transylvania" series but hardly possesses Disney's storied legacy.
As it turns out, “In the Heights” wasn’t the only project from Lin-Manual Miranda’s pre-“Hamilton” days just itching to find its way onto the big screen and that musical’s cowriter, Quiara Alegría Hudes, returns here to flesh out his original songs and characters with “The Croods” director Kirk DeMicco into a colorful and energetic cross-generational and cross-cultural tale in which music is the language of love.
“What difference can one song make?” asks “Vivo,” a super-saturated, instant-classic musical cartoon from Kirk DeMicco, director of “The Croods,” featuring a whole bunch of catchy new songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda — a man who’s spent his career proving just how impactful clever music can be.
Lin-Manuel Miranda and the director of "The Croods" team up for a kid-friendly musical that starts on a high note before losing its rhythm.
Thanks to a sharp script by Quiara Alegría Hudes and The Croods filmmaker Kirk DeMicco, who also directs, the film is a comic delight as Miranda’s one-liners mostly land and Gabi remains the right side of infuriating.
Conceived in 2005 under the catchier title “Crood Awakening,” with John Cleese and trade journo-turned-agent-turned-screenwriter Kirk DeMicco (“Racing Stripes”) set to script, “The Croods” was intended to further DreamWorks’ collaboration with Aardman Animation (“Chicken Run,” “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” “Flushed Away”) before the two companies parted ways in 2006.
The film evolved out of a project first announced at Cannes in 2005 under the title Crood Awakening, which was to reteam DreamWorks with artisanal British toon shop Aardman Animation after successes like Chicken Run.
Originally announced in 2005, under the title Crood Awakening, the movie was intended to be a collaboration between DreamWorks and Britain’s Aardman Animations (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run), although the only relic of that is a story co-credit to John Cleese and a vestigial tale of our species’ evolution from risk-adverse beginnings to becoming more adventurous creatures.