Egg on Your Face

This review comes to you courtesy of Jordan Whitmore, who commissioned me for a review of a film that I saw in the cinema at age six, and had blessedly not thought about once in the intervening years.

There are a great many things that mark Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius out as a product of the early 2000s, from within the film and without, right on up to the fact that it exists at all. At a time when Disney (and traditional animation generally) was at a low ebb and Pixar had demonstrated massive financial and artistic success in the realm of 3D animation, but before anyone had really figured out how to replicate it, there was an anything-goes environment that hasn't really existed since the staggering success of Finding Nemo and Shrek 2 in the middle of the decade set the mold for most 3D animation. These days a film like Jimmy Neutron, adapted from a handful of 90s shorts and intended to kickstart a TV series, would have been consigned from day one to a straight-to-video or TV premiere. In fact, that was the precise fate intended for the film until Paramount decided that it looked vaguely enough like a real movie to release it in theatres because, essentially, there was no reason not to at the time. Thank god we now live in a more civilised time, when we can breathe easy and eagerly await the release of Cars 3.

Releasing Jimmy Neutron theatrically was an impulse that paid off, too, when the film grossed over three times its budget and managed to land itself an Academy Award nomination, of all fucking things. Not an unimpressive fate for a movie that is not for one second visually appealing in the slightest, and stuffed end-to-end with characters who don't resemble human beings, in appearance or in behaviour, rendered in the cheapest and ugliest CGI money could buy in 2001. I suppose those things are easier to overlook in the company of the film's impressive litany of jokes revolving around bodily functions, or its transparent stabs at promoting merchandise and its own TV spinoff series.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the adventures of its titular character (played by Debi Derryberry), a precocious 8-year-old from the town of Retroville whose antics are perpetually getting he and many of his peers into hot water. The most prominent of these other children are Carl Wheezer (Rob Paulsen), who is forever the subject of violence and ridicule, but is also fat, which makes it funny; Sheen Estevez (Jeffrey Garcia), who is obsessed with a superhero named Ultraman to the exclusion of all else; Nick Dean (Candi Milo), who wears denim and rides a skateboard and therefore could not be cooler by the standards of early-2000s media; and Cindy Vortex (Carolyn Lawrence), who has no time for Jimmy's reckless and impractical science and is therefore an uppity bitch who is jealous of how smart he is and probably has cooties too, because it's never too early to instill toxic attitudes like that in young boys.

Eventually, something like 30 minutes into a film that comes up at 79 total, the entire adult population of Retroville is kidnapped by aliens (whose king is played by an unfathomably overqualified Patrick Stewart) for reasons that are mostly contrived and entirely Jimmy's fault, and the film starts to shift gears into something that actually resembles a narrative. "Resembles", mind, because until the final fifteen minutes the film mostly continues to consist of aimless wackiness, but it's in space now and there's some lazy moralising about how total independence may look like fun, but children are really just helpless incompetents who should defer to their parents' wisdom at all times (Finding Nemo would end up treading similar thematic ground with a far more sensitive and nuanced approach only two years later).

Jimmy Neutron could not wear its television origins on its sleeve any more clearly. The entire film is locked into a rigidly monotonous episodic structure where five minutes of exposition leads into thirty seconds of gadget-fueled slapstick, over and over and over again until the film has spun its wheels long enough to scrape into feature length and everyone can fight the aliens and rescue their parents and go home. You could probably section the entire movie into ten-minute chunks and screen them one a week with no impact on its pacing or coherence, and for all I know that may have been the plan at one point or another during production.

While that's enough to seriously hamper the film, it might not necessarily be enough to bury it. "Gadget-based slapstick", after all, could also be used to describe Aardman animation's vastly wonderful Wallace and Gromit features, and they are masterpieces of animation all. Hell, Jimmy even has a robotic canine sidekick! The key difference is that Aardman's films are animated with great care and attention to detail, bursting at the seams with personality, while Jimmy Neutron was cobbled together with off-the-shelf animation software and burp jokes. It's a horrifyingly ugly movie, where everything is made up of textureless blobs and nobody has apparently ever heard of a neck. Seriously, Carl's head appears to jut out of the front of his torso, and poor Sheen is afflicted with a flat, chinless face that tapers to a point somewhere inside his shoulders.

It's funny, really, for a movie so concerning alien abductions to almost feel like it was made by aliens itself. Nothing in the animation or the writing or even the marketing suggests that anyone involved knew how human beings think or act or look. The film is entirely devoid of merit for adults, and I'm hard-pressed to imagine any child who would be more than moderately diverted by the lowbrow humour or the pandering concept. Certainly nobody then and especially not now could have responded with any great degree of positivity to its visual design or its cardboard cutout characters.

And yet I'd still sooner rewatch it than Shrek.

Crood Humour

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