The Croods is a fucking ugly movie.
There's no other way to put it, and it's something that the movie is never able to fully recover from. Dreamworks animation have a storied history with regards to visual fidelity, with their previous films ranging from unspeakably hideous to kind of okay. The Croods is pretty uneven itself - many of the environments (quite a few of which are, admittedly, actually paintings) are quite lovely indeed, the menagerie of bizarre pseudo-prehistoric animals are a little less so, and the human characters are... well, there's where things get rocky. Bad enough that they should have the Dreamworks standard-issue waxy skin, but the poor humans in this movie suffer from a virtually never-ending series of afflictions: their hair is rendered in immobile blocks that sit about a centimetre off their scalps, their teeth seem to float inside their mouths, their bodies don't respond to light and shadow properly, and they perpetually seem to be floating just a little bit in front of the frame. All this on top of character designs that already overshoot a comical idea of cavemen right into lumpy, inhuman flesh-things. I have no idea if it was the complicated production history (this began life as an Aardman project) or something else entirely, but The Croods does not for one second look like a 135 million dollar motion picture.
I make such a big deal of this not to condemn the film, however, but to commend directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco for making a film that ends up managing to be pretty damn good in the face of one of the most crippling flaws any film could be saddled with. Sanders, as we know from Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon (both of which he co-directed with Dean DeBlois, who sat this one out in favour of helming a sequel to HTTYD) is a fairly wonderful director of animation, capable of balancing tone, keeping the pace lively and engineering physical comedy with great panache. The Croods is not as fine as either of those movies, but it still makes for very light, breezy family entertainment - and it's at least more even than HTTYD, which I found had a deathly boring stretch towards the end.
The Croods centres on a primitive family - the Croods of the title - who live a quietly conservative existence out of their tiny cave. The family patriarch Grug (Nicolas Cage, choosing to behave himself) keeps his wife Ugga (a woefully underused Catherine Keener), mother-in-law (Cloris Leachman) and three children - son Thunk (Clark Duke) and daughters Eep (Emma Stone) and Sandy (Randy Thorn) - safe through constant fear and intimidation, treating anything new or unusual as life-threatening. Most of the Crood family isn't thrilled with this way of life, but it keeps them from going the way of their deceased neighbouring families, and that's good enough for them. Eep, however, chafes under her father's strict rules and longs to explore the world outside the cave. It's on one such sojourn that she runs into Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a more evolved kind of caveman who comes bearing tidings of the end of the world. He ends up being right, and the Croods are forced out of their cave and into the big wide world. If you guessed that from this point they meet up with Guy, tensions run high, lessons are learned and family bonds are strengthened then you get absolutely nothing, because no shit they do.
It's a hoary old plot, alright, but it goes down more than well enough thanks to a few things. First and possibly most importantly, the voice cast is firing on all cylinders to make the Crood family dynamic feel real and lived-in - they're absolutely convincing as a family of people who have known one another for years and who deeply love and can't stand each other in equal measure. In addition to this, the exact moment the plot kicks into gear and gets familiar is also the moment that we get exposed to the greater world of The Croods, and it's a terrific work of art design. Not all the designs are perfect (in particular, I never really warmed to the sabre-toothed cat that crops up throughout the movie), but most of the flora and fauna that dot the landscape of the film are a delight to see come to life in all their warped, cartoon glory. Finally, the directors do an excellent job of establishing real stakes at the climax, and making the danger facing the characters feel clear and present at all times, enough so that the eminently predictable ending actually feels surprising and earned.
Really though, the plot just fades into the background most of the time. The tone of The Croods is one of light comedy at almost all times, and that works out just fine for it. It's mostly well-assembled and elaborate physical comedy, although all of the characters except Ugga get at least one or two moments to shine in the dialogue. Not all of the humour lands; some of the physical comedy descends into too-broad slapstick, and there is one deeply regrettable animal sidekick whose jokes all revolve around the grating anachronistic humour that has plagued Dreamworks animated films since time immemorial, but I was laughing out loud more often than not.
It's hard not to feel at least a little disappointed by The Croods, and it's definitely a step down from Sanders's previous work as a director, but that still leaves it plenty of room to be big, silly and hugely entertaining, as well as position it well above the heap in the Dreamworks back catalogue.
7/10
