BEFORE: This is another film from the director of "My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea", so it's no surprise that THREE actors carry over. Some directors like to cast the same actors over and over, even in animation. Louisa Krause is one (she'll be here tomorrow, also), the other two are listed below.
It's been one heck of a week in New York City, what with 4/20 and then Earth Day, and this confluence also meant that the band Phish has been in town, playing a series of concerts at Madison Square Garden. There's some construction work being done at the MSG complex, so from what I can tell, the Phish-heads have taken over every hotel and bar within a four-block radius, so this means even MORE freaks and weirdos in midtown Manhattan than usual. And, at the same time, cannabis has just become legal in New York, as a few PSAs on TV have informed me, so yeah, as a result of all this, the whole city smells like weed now. So here's another stoner film for you, I think.
THE PLOT: Cryptozookeepers try to capture a Baku, a dream-eating hybrid creature of legend, and start wondering if they should display these beasts or keep them hidden and unknown.
AFTER: This was the film that made my boss, a professional animator, not like this Dash Shaw fellow. He just couldn't understand the plot, I think, which concerns a group of people tracking cryptid beasts around the world and trying to capture them before the U.S. government can turn them into weapons. Duh, simple! I should note that my boss has always had a similar problem with the ending sequence of "2001: A Space Odyssey" - his argument was "nobody knows what that ending is about..." That's also simple, especially if you read the source material, the Arthur C. Clarke novel and its sequels - that freaky ending sequence is astronaut Dave Bowman entering the monolith, unlocking its secrets and becoming the StarChild, gaining mastery over space and time. Again, it's simple enough, if you just do a little research.
The WHY of "Cryptozoo" is also very simple - the animator wanted to draw a bunch of crazy cryptozoological characters, like unicorns and Pegasuses and a purple Bigfoot, a griffin, a giant octopus and a super-giant serpent. Anything else? Sure, a Gorgon (Medusa) and a satyr (Pan) except here they're named Phoebe and Gustav, because they're not the SAME ones from the Greek myths, they're just that same species, I guess. And there's a Baku, which legend says was put together by the Gods from the leftover pieces that didn't go in to the other animals. It's got a trunk like an elephant and it devours your nightmares, so very helpful - it could help me get rid of that stress dream where I'm back in high school, or the one where I'm moving into a new apartment, or the one where my ex-wife is kissing another woman just to stick it to me. (I think I need a Baku.)
This is apparently set in the 1960's, near San Francisco, because a couple of hippie nudists out in the woods encounter the giant fence that surrounds the cryptozoo, and well, it doesn't end well for one of them thanks to a pissed-off unicorn. The 1960's was probably the heyday for cryptids, so many of them ended up appearing on the covers of rock albums, and then in the 1970's, there was a show called "In Search Of..." where Leonard Nimoy introduced viewers to the Loch Ness Monster, the Bigfoot and UFO's, only the scantest of corroborative evidence was given, plus note that the show was all about the searching, and not the FINDING.
The 1980's and 90's were tough, the only thing that kept the story of the cryptids alive was a little newspaper called the Weekly World News, which also introduced us to BatBoy and the aliens that the Clintons were banging or adopting, mer-people, cat-women, alligator people and kangaroo women. They were smart about this, for every five phony stories they'd drop in a real one, so if you saw that one story in another legit newspaper, then by extension the stuff about Bigfoot and Nessie just HAD to be real, too. But these kept the stories alive long enough until the cable reality TV explosion of the early 2000's, which explains why every show on the "History" Channel these days is about Bigfoot, aliens or Nazi magic. But I digress.
So I didn't really enjoy this film, but it's for completely different reasons than my boss. I just really want to call the animation techniques used here into question. I was hoping for something really Terry Gilliam-like, because if you gave Gilliam enough drawings of fantastic creatures, he could really turn them into something. But while this animation style is a quantum leap forward from "My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea", it's not enough. The animation is still BAD, and I say this as someone who took two semesters of animation production at NYU, and still had nothing good to show for it at the end. The animated films I made stunk, big-time, but at least I'm man enough to admit it. I almost HAD to get a job in animation after graduating, just to justify the expense of the tuition. But I get the feeling that somebody looked at "Cryptozoo" after it was done and said, "Why, yes, we did a fantastic job!" and nothing could be further from the truth.
One thing that bothered me was the walking - imagine the foot of a walking person, it looks different when a step is first taken than when that same foot is in mid-step, with the person's full weight on it, then different again when it's behind the person, as it gets lifted up to move forward to take another step. In animator lingo, this is called a "walk cycle", and everybody knows that the shape of the foot HAS to change at the different points of the cycle. Not here, though.
Does this animator know what people walking even looks like? I don't know, maybe could he look at some footage of people walking, before animating that? I'm sure he could find some footage online to study. For that matter, does he know what people having sex looks like? People were barely moving in that orgy scene, so does that even qualify as an orgy, if it's in slow-motion? Maybe the animator could look at some footage of people having sex, before animating that? I'm sure he could find some footage online to study - but this raises a whole new set of questions for me. I suppose that if the sex were TOO graphic here, then the film would get an NC-17 rating, but come on, you gotta give me something, or it becomes an orgy where everyone's drunk or on depressants or just all had a very heavy meal and can't perform, and that's not sexy at all.
I can't believe this film played at Sundance, and won an Innovator Award there. Actually, I kind of can, because one year at Sundance (2004?), I watched a film called "In the Realms of the Unreal", which was a documentary about Henry Darger, a reclusive janitor in the Chicago area who wrote an elaborate 15,000 page fantasy novel, with a ton of paintings and drawings that illustrated his concepts. The book was, I assume, terrible - most writers have writer's block, this guy had the opposite problem - and the documentary used really terrible cut-out animation to bring his story to life, which really, never should have happened. Please, just let it die.
And that's kind of where I land with "Cryptozoo", as in, was this trip really necessary? Did we need to debate the topic of "zoos" any further, especially in relation to animals that don't even actually exist? Cancel culture took care of circuses, and if they weren't being helpful in preserving certain species, I'm betting zoos would be next on the list. But should we lock up Bigfoot and unicorns and pegasuses? It's a ridiculous question, when you consider it - there's no point in even asking! So go ahead, light up a joint or smoke a bowl if that helps you enjoy this film, but otherwise don't bother. I only watched it because I was curious to see what pissed my boss off so much, and now I know, so I got what I needed, and I'm out.
Also starring Lake Bell (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Michael Cera (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Angeliki Papoulia (last seen in "The Lobster"), Zoe Kazan (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Peter Stormare (last seen in "Birth"), Grace Zabriskie (last seen in "Drugstore Cowboy"), Thomas Jay Ryan (also carrying over from "My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea"), Alex Karpovsky (ditto), Emily Davis (ditto), Irene Muscara, Rajesh Parameswaran, Ami Patel, Owen K. Price, Joce Soubiran.
RATING: 3 out of 10 tarot cards (and please, just do a little research about how tarot card readings work before you write one into your screenplay...you couldn't spend 10 minutes on this?)
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