The Croods (2013)
Directed by Chris Sanders
The prehistoric Croods family live in a particularly dangerous moment in time. Patriarch Grug, his mate Ugga, teenage daughter Eep, son Thunk, and feisty Gran gather food by day and huddle together in a cave at night. When a more evolved caveman named Guy arrives on the scene, Grug is distrustful, but it soon becomes apparent that Guy is correct about the impending destruction of their world.
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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.
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.
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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.
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."
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The Croods include family leader Grug, dense son Thunk and our heroine Eep, a Cro-Magnon version of Jennifer Grey from "Dirty Dancing."
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.