The Croods

So, if you haven't heard, I myself am an animator.  I love animation, I do animation, and I'm striving to one day work on films like this.  I'm warning you because this review might get a little technical, but I'll try to keep it to a minimum.

DreamWorks comes out with a pleasant surprise for the first major animated feature of the year!  (we're just going to ignore Escape from Planet Earth, everyone else did)

Nothing to see here...

I was very skeptical going into The Croods, largely due to the terrible MovieTickets ad that has played before every single film I've seen this year.  The other reason was the awful design for the title characters.

You ugly! And soulless!

Even so, I still trusted DreamWorks to deliver, and they did.  The story starts out rough and slowly becomes more meaningful, with incredibly warm moments towards the end (that cursed eye sweat again).  

The story is about a family of cavemen who live in fear of the world, and then the world starts crashing down around them.  They live on the supercontinent Pangea which is beginning to separate.  That kind of continental shift is very gradual, you know, like nearly a whole week...  Geological inaccuracies aside, it sets the stage for some stunning effects and forces the characters to move forward and leave their old ways behind.

The animation quality was surprisingly excellent, but made sense after I saw that legendary animator James Baxter served as the Head of Character Animation.  Each Crood is imbued with certain animal behaviors in their movements and everything flows wonderfully.  There are some moments when it felt like the animation got a little out of control, almost mo-cap like, and that drew me out a bit, but no one else should notice.

On the topic of animation I have to mention the camera work.  The start of the movie was a very, very rough ride.  The camera wouldn't stay still long enough to get an idea of where you were, and with no establishing shots it was hard to see the relation of each character and the environment.  The handheld feel was pushed beyond extreme, and just when I wanted to grab the camera and chain it down there's a sequence where it literally moves well over 200mph.  I didn't see much of that because my face was buried in my palms.  It does calm down later though, so don't worry.

While the characters were ugly I really have to commend the creature design.  All the animals were amazing to look at and incredibly creative.  I won't talk about them, I'll just show you pictures.

So fluffy!

Part cat, part owl!

Horrifying bird things!

...This!

The environments matched the creativity of the creatures and made for a huge world with vastly different ecosystems to explore.  All in all, a very pretty film to look at.

So it's got a great story, it's very pretty (minus the cast, but you'll get over that), and the animation is top quality.  Even from a critical animator jerk I'd definitely recommend this film to anyone, no matter your age.  Go see it, have fun.

The movie is worth it for this image alone.