"The Croods" and "Epic"

I've been falling behind on my movie reviews, so I'm going to spend most of this week playing catch-up. This year has been full of animated sequels, but there were two notable original entries from earlier in the year that deserve a little discussion.

Dreamworks' "The Croods" was a nice surprise. The trailers laid out the story of a family of cavemen who have survived harsh times by living in constant fear and rarely leaving the safety of their cave, and pointed to a pretty typical parent-child bonding narrative. The young heroine must break free from constraining tradition, but must also remember to love and cherish her overprotective dad because he only wants the best for her. Frankly, I wasn't expecting much.

However, the major creative force behind the movie was Chris Sanders, who wrote and directed with Kirk DeMicco. Sanders previously brought us "How to Train Your Dragon" and "Lilo & Stitch," family bonding movies that managed to present their sentiments without feeling too mushy. "The Croods" is likewise very good at being entertaining while telling us its very familiar story. The Crood family consists of father Grug (Nicholas Cage), mother Ugga (Catherine Keener), son Thunk (Clark Duke), baby girl Sandy (Randy Thom), aged Gran (Cloris Leachman), and finally the teenage daughter who yearns for something more out of life than just surviving it, Eep (Emma Stone).

The destruction of their home cave and a chance encounter with a wanderer named Guy (Ryan Reynolds) set the Crood brood off on a road trip of discovery. The big selling point of of the film is its gorgeous visuals, giving us an endlessly fascinating, colorful prehistoric world full of impossible sights and made-up creatures. Reality was clearly only a jumping-off point. Tiny furry elephants swarm underfoot like mice. A sabre-toothed tiger has coloration that wouldn't look out of place on Lisa Frank merchandise. This is set in roughly the same period as the "Ice Age" movies, but "The Croods" has much more diverse and richly rendered environments, presenting one eye-popping vista after another.

The character work is also great. Grug's obsessions over safety are well-founded, because their world is full of danger. An early sequence where the family goes hunting turns into a massive action sequence where they barely escape multiple predators, and get to show off finely honed fighting skills and personal idiosyncrasies. Though she may be more sensitive, their's nothing remotely dainty about Eep, who Hulk-smashes her enemies with the same ferocity as the rest of her family. There's an energy and a expressiveness to the animation of our cavemen heroes that is too often missing from other recent CGI films. A lot of thought and care went into the way they move and behave, and it shows. And ultimately, it's the Croods themselves who make the movie work.

Much less successful, but still commendable for its ambitions, is Blue Sky's "Epic." This is the studio that brought us the "Ice Age" movies. You'd never think "Epic" was the work of the same studio, because this is a big step up for them in many different ways. "Epic" features a society of tiny people living in the woods who are deeply connected to nature. (Think "The Borrowers" crossed with "Ferngully") A teenage human girl, Mary Katherine or MK (Amanda Seyfried) is magically shrunk down to their size and joins a pair of noble Leafmen warriors, Nod (Josh Hutcherson) and Ronan (Colin Ferrell) on an eventful quest to save their forest from the destructive Boggans, lead by the evil Mandrake (Christoph Waltz) and his son Dagda (Blake Anderson).

It's a lovely world the Blue Sky artists have created here, full of fine details and charming ideas. However, as with the last films that heavily involved fantasy author William Joyce, "Rise of the Guardians" and "Meet the Robinsons," the beautifully designed characters are awfully flat. MK, a spunky kid having a hard time connecting with her scientist father, Professor Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), is so typical, she's immediately forgettable. The same is true for her rebellious love interest Nod. The only characters who have much personality are secondary ones like the Forest Queen Tara (Beyonce Knowles) and the comic relief duo of Mug the slug (Aziz Ansari) and Grub the snail (Chris O'Dowd). Steven Tyler also shows up as a psychedelic glowworm.

The plot is pretty contrived stuff, hinging on lots of arbitrary rules that aren't well grounded at all. So much time is spent explaining what has to happen how and when, there's not much time for character development. We get just enough hints of relationships and backstory that it's frustrating that we don't get more. Many of the concepts just aren't well thought through at all, and it's too easy to poke holes in them. However, this is miles better than anything else Blue Sky has produced in years and I hope they continue to push themselves this way. There's a lot of potential on display here, and I'm curious what the studio is going to do next.
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