Discovering wonderful animated film ‘The Croods’
“IN PREHISTORIC times, mankind often had only two choices in crisis situations: fifight or flflee. In moderns times we are offffffffffffered a third alternative; fifight, flflee — or laugh,” said Robert Orben.
ONCE UPON a time — like, 2013 — Emma Stone was not a shoo-in for an Academy Award for a fifilm called “La La Land.” And Ryan Reynolds had not become a big deal again with his profanely funny “Deadpool” movie. They were doing fifine, but not quite at the Everest peaks upon which they currently perch.
Still and all, Miss Stone, Mr. Reynolds, Nicolas Cage, Catherine Keener and Cloris Leachman did do something wonderful that year, which I am just getting around to. It is an animated fifilm from DreamWorks called “The Croods.”
I’m not going to apologize for praising something that perhaps a lot of you have already seen. I’d never heard of it. Or if I did, maybe the odd title — “The Croods” — turned me offffffffffff.
Listen, here, we often carry on about the works of the long dead or about TV series we are only now discovering on Netflflix or Amazon, but everybody else has been wise to for ages. So this is practically breaking news!
“The Croods” concerns a Neanderthal family dealing with tumultuous changes — an earthquake disrupts the simple, if somewhat boring, life they’ve always known.
Nicolas Cage voices the father, Catherine Keener, the mother. Emma Stone is their rebellious teenage daughter and Ryan Reynolds is a guy named Guy, who wants to show the family — especially Emma — that there’s more than one way to be a cave dweller. In fact, why dwell in a dark cave at all? The divine veteran Cloris Leachman voices a mother-in-law that makes Doris Roberts’ Marie on “Everybody Loves Raymond” look like a really good deal. Clark Davis and Chris Sanders are also in on the fun.
I was completely swept up in the adventures of this crew, as they encounter various surprises — the sun, the moon, the stars, fifire, things to eat, things that want to eat them, other caves, crevices, the sea, weapons, etc. They explore the land and face their own fears in order to survive.
The young among them are appealing in their curiosity about what constitutes the world around them. And the old are constantly shunted aside, or they are tolerated. The odious mother-in-law (Miss Leachman) survives in spite of hilarious neglect. She just won’t die! Everything is frightening and exciting.
Obviously “The Croods” doesn’t really show us the way it was for prehistoric man (and various creatures), but it is so imaginatively animated, written and acted (Nic Cage is simply wonderful as the father) that you are convinced, at least for the length of the movie, that maybe it could have been something like this. Lis- ten, the Croods invent cave painting!
This is the kind of animated movie that you can take a kid to but won’t go out of your mind with boredom; family-issue oriented without being preachy or heavy-handed. It is really a movie about cooperation, adapting and learning new things. (Early on in the movie, one of the characters says, “We aren’t living, we’re just NOT dying!”) As with a lot of truly fifine animated fifilms, along with the humor there’s that little moment when you think, “Now stop this, I am not going to cry over a cartoon!”
And then you remember that full-grown adults still get emotional over the death of Bambi’s mother, so go ahead and have a bit of a snifflffle as the Croods make their way in a brave new world.