Cryptozoo review: Dash Shaw’s animated adventure is strictly for adults

[Ed. note: This review was first published in conjunction with Cryptozoo’s release at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. It has been updated for the film’s streaming release.]

Logline: In a world secretly full of mythical monsters, three women try to gather the strange surviving creatures and bring them to a sanctuary where people can appreciate them in peace. A military bounty hunter has more brutal plans for the world’s cryptids.

Longest line: Dash Shaw, the comics artist and freelance animator behind 2016’s funny and bizarre movie My whole high school sinks in the sea, come back with Cryptozoo, which is equally forced, wild and unpredictable. Opening a dreamy sex scene, where partners Amber (Louisa Krause) and Matthew (Michael Cera) strip in the woods at night and dream of a future hippie ideal of world peace and equality, the film takes a grotesquely bloody turn. Almost immediately. They live in an ugly world that does not respect high ideals and wonderful vibes. Cryptid hunter Lauren Gray (Lake Bell) certainly knows: from childhood, when a Japanese dream-eating creature called baku To rid her of the nightmares, Lauren has been trying to protect the cryptids from capture, exploitation and slaughter.

It’s a tough job, both because locals at sites around the world tend to capture cryptids for nefarious purposes, and because Lauren’s opposite number, Nick (Thomas Jay Ryan), follows her around the world, collecting her finds for the The US military wants Baku in particular because it believes it could be used to erase “the dreams of the counterculture” and put an end to leftist protests for good. Lauren ends up chasing the Baku in front of her, with the help of the gorgon Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia), her aging idealistic patron Joan (Grace Zabriskie) and the unreliable mercenary faun Gustav (Peter Stormare).

That Cryptozoo Trying to do? The movie is nominally an adventure story, complete with gunfights, fistfights, slaughter of cryptids against cryptids, and a quest that ends badly for a host of humans and creatures. But it also has a strong anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian streak that extends not only to the military-industrial complex, but more generally to humanity’s relationship with animals in general. When Phoebe first sees the soon-to-open Cryptozoo, the sanctuary where Joan houses dozens of oddities, some with human intelligence, the gorgon is deeply disappointed. He points out that it looks more like a shopping mall than a shelter. And it does – it’s packed with mall stores and carnival shows, and Lauren boasts that they sell toys inspired by every confirmed cryptid. The garish zoo may not be his ideal form of protection, but it is necessary, he says, he has to earn money to support himself.

While the Cryptozoo itself is built on that compromise between idealism and practicality, Joan is a thoroughbred type whose worldview revolves around love. She has a passionate and supportive relationship with one of her cryptids, and she is convinced that the world’s problems can be solved with more of these kinds of connections. But she and her fellow conservationists may benefit more than the cryptids. The movie finally suggests that trying to contain them is doing them no favors. Shaw recognizes Lauren’s heroism in taking on predators who see every creature and person around them in terms of profit. But even she receives harsh criticism from Nick, who feels like he’s doing the job as much for his own reassurance as he is out of sheer emotion.

The quote that says it all: “We can only greet the strange and unusual with love. And if we show them love, they will return the love. And love will spread and envelop all beings in our diverse and wonderful world. “

Does it get there? CryptozooMorale can feel fuzzy in the midst of all the action and incident, that you feel more focused on communicating the widely varied personalities and goals of your characters than finding common ground between them. That makes the narrative feel more realistic than the average adventure story, but also messier and more prone to distractions, like a subplot about Phoebe’s impending marriage that doesn’t amount to much. The Cryptid Protectors are not a unified or even focused group, they are a handful of temporary allies who do not fully agree on methodology or purpose, except when the going gets serious.

The pace also varies widely: the opening wooded idyll feels like an unhurried short story, with Matthew naked atop Cryptozoo’s high near like a beautiful dream image in a long sequence of them. But a confrontation between Lauren and Nick over a Russian bird-woman hybrid named Altonost feels more like an episode of Raiders of the lost ark, complete with Belloq swooping in to grab the idol after Indy does all the hard work. The film goes back and forth between action and the logic of dreams, and between embracing high ideals and seeing how people suffer as they try and fail to put them into practice. It’s certainly a cynical story – Shaw’s script has little faith in his heroes’ ability to save the day or his good intentions trying.

What does that bring us? Very similar All my high school Sinking into the sea, or for that matter like any good outsider art, Cryptozoo It ends up as a window into a decidedly uncommercial mind and a form of storytelling that is not the effort of the polished and practiced committee that springs up from animation houses like Disney and DreamWorks. It’s rare to see American animation directed solely and specifically at adults, but Cryptozoo is remarkably focused on an auteur audience, not just because of the sexual and violent content hostile to children here, but because of the complicated and philosophical point-of-view shifts of the entire project.

And after generations of increasingly processed and visually elaborate films from those media and others that mimic them, the rough hand-drawn feel of projects like Cryptozoo it can be shocking. It would be easy to call it ugly, but it is more accurate to call it idiosyncratic. Certainly, the images deserve a much closer examination, to see where the textures of paints and pencils give the images a rougher and more specific feel, or where it changes from one style to another, such as the difference between the raw contours of the face of Lauren and the fine … Phoebe’s snake hair lined detail: gives the protagonists an even more visual character.

Sometimes the movement of the character in Cryptozoo remember the one from Indonesia puppetry, with rigid figures that move largely around the joints. Some sequences deviate into a completely different style, such as the beautiful light show performed at one point by a series of sentient light creatures. Nothing about where the story is going or how it will get there stylistically can be taken for granted. That is one of the greatest joys of Shaw’s projects: the feeling that something new and different is happening, of that anti-capitalist, anti-conformist and anti-containment bent that runs throughout history and also extends to all aspects of the aesthetics of the film.

The most memorable moment: Cryptozoo it’s packed with surprising moments and weird visuals that creative memers could certainly reuse, but perhaps the most obvious come when Phoebe’s head snakes bite people. The victims are not only poisoned, their flesh rebels and distorts, filling Akira. The image is a good setup for an “Oh no, the consequences of my own actions!” Style meme.

When can we see it? Cryptozoo is now widely available for digital rental or purchase via streaming platforms such as Amazon and Vudu.