Living in a time before the discovery of fire, prey to pitilessly ferocious and oversized prehistoric predators, the isolated family spend the hours of darkness lying in a heap together on the floor of a cold cave, with occasional desperate forays outside during daylight to scavenge what food they can find.
It didn’t help that the Croods are the most oddly-proportioned human cartoons since The Incredibles (maybe because they run on all fours) and that father Crood – name of Grug – is played by Nicholas Cage, whose appearance in a movie lately is almost a guarantee of disappointment.
However, as the disembodied voice of a cartoon cave man, Cage may have found a new metre, and The Croods quickly turns brighter than its gloomy opening scenes suggest.
Grug’s teenage daughter Eep (Emma Stone) is going through a difficult stage and longs to leave the cave and her overprotective father.
Just then a teenage cave-boy turns up (voiced by Ryan Reynolds, but drawn like Jake Gyllenhaal) to warn the family of a coming volcanic disaster that will destroy their home.
Soon enough, the Croods are on the road, and struggling to handle the new invention of “fire” that will let them survive outside at night.
It becomes obvious early on that the Croods’ world is not quite the one we know, which I deduced from clues like a leopard-spotted elephant and a crocodile-beaked dodo.
Where the Ice Age movies dabbled in known, albeit talking, neolithic megafauna, the prehistoric wildlife in The Croods is outright fantastic.
When the the Stone Age family move into a hidden valley, the artists really go to work with a 3D rendition of a fantasy world comparable to the planet Pandora in Avatar – and in fact it’s unshamedly borrowed from Avatar, but with flying mock-turtles, not Pandoran banshees.
In the same vein, later scenes parody sequences from The Lion King and Lord of the Rings movies, among others.
The Croods does suffer slightly from its presentation of Disney’s obligatory family-friendly message – in this case, a cloaked rebuke of restrictive conservatism and positive reinforcement for the traditional father-daughter bond.
As a result, snippets of meaningful dialog are hammered in between the slapstick action and comic gags at regular intervals, in case you forget.
The Croods may not be as evolved (I’m sorry) as recent animated movies like Despicable Me, Megamind or the Toy Story series, but it’s fun enough to keep parents entertained for 98 minutes while their younger kids enjoy what may be their first 3D movie – teenagers will probably like GI Joe better.
4 Stars (out of 5)
Director:
Kirk DeMicco
Chris Sanders
Stars:
Nicolas Cage
Emma Stone
Ryan Reynolds
Runs:
98 minutes