Cryptozoo Review: The Rare Adult-Only Animated Movie

The Polygon animation team is signed up for the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, which has gone virtual for the first time. Here’s what you need to know about the indie gems that will soon be making their way into streaming services, theaters and the cinematic zeitgeist.

Log line: In a world full of mythical monsters, three women try to collect the surviving weird creatures and take them to a shrine where people can appreciate them in peace. A military bounty hunter has more brutal plans for the trio.

Longer line: Dash Shaw, the comic book artist and indie animator behind the pleasantly bizarre 2016 My entire high school is sinking into the sea, comes back with Cryptozoo, which is similarly stilted, wild and unpredictable. The film opens in a dreamy sex scene, where partners Amber (Louisa Krause) and Matthew (Michael Cera) come naked in the woods at night and dream of an ideal hippie future of world peace and equality, and the film almost immediately takes a grotesque gory turn. . They live in an ugly world that doesn’t respect high ideals and groovy vibes. Cryptid hunter Lauren Gray (Lake Bell) knows for sure: Since childhood, when a dream-eating Japanese creature called a baku delivered her from nightmares, Lauren has tried to protect cryptids from capture, exploitation and slaughter.

It’s a tough job, both because locals in locations around the world tend to trap cryptids for nefarious purposes, and because Lauren’s counterpart Nick (Thomas Jay Ryan) follows her around the world and picks up her finds for it. US Army. He especially wants the baku because he believes it can be used to erase “the dreams of counterculture” and put an end to left-wing protests for good. Lauren chases the baku just ahead of him, with the help of the gorgon Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia), their aging idealistic patron Joan (Grace Zabriskie) and the untrustworthy mercenary Faun Gustav (Peter Stormare).

Image: Sundance Institute

What’s Cryptozoo trying to do? The film is nominally an adventure story, complete with gunfights, fistfights, cryptid-on-cryptic slaughter and a quest that ends badly for an awful lot of people 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 broadly to humanity’s relationship with animals in general. When Phoebe first sees the soon-to-be-opened Cryptozoo, the shrine that houses Joan dozens of quirks, some with human intelligence, the gorgon is deeply disappointed. She points out that it looks more like a mall than a retreat. And it does – it’s full of comic book stores and Carnival sideshows, with Lauren boasting that they sell toys modeled after every cryptid confirmed. The ostentatious zoo may not be her ideal form of protection, but she does have to make money to make a living.

While the Cryptozoo itself is built around that compromise between idealism and practicality, Joan is a purebred pie-in-the-sky type whose worldview revolves around love. She has a supportive, passionate relationship with one of her cryptids, and she believes the world’s problems can be solved with more connections like this one. But she and her fellow conservationists may benefit more than the cryptids. The film ultimately suggests that trying to control them is of no use to them. Shaw recognizes Lauren’s heroism in facing off against the predators who see every creature and person around them in terms of profit. But even she gets harsh criticism from Nick, who feels she’s doing the job, both for her own peace of mind and for the raw sensation.

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 love. And love will spread and envelop all beings in our diverse and wonderful world. “

Image: Sundance Institute

Will it get there? CryptozooMorals can feel hazy in the midst of all the action and incident, which is more focused on communicating the vastly different personalities and goals of his characters than on finding common ground between them. That makes the story feel more realistic than the average adventure story, but also more messy and more susceptible to distraction, like a subplot around Phoebe’s upcoming wedding that doesn’t mean much. The cryptid protectors are not a united or even focused group, they are a handful of temporary allies who don’t quite agree on methodology or purpose, except when the situation turns into serial.

The pace also varies widely – the first woodsy idyll feels like a nondescript short story, with Matthew naked atop the tall Cryptozoo fence as just one beautiful dream image in a long series of it. But a clash between Lauren and Nick over a Russian bird-woman hybrid called an alkonost feels more like an episode Raiders of the Lost Ark, complete with Belloq diving in to get the idol after Indy does all the hard work. The film moves back and forth between action and dream logic, and between embracing high ideals and watching people suffer while trying not to carry them out. It’s a cynical story for sure – Shaw’s script has little faith in his heroes’ ability to save the day, or in their good intentions to try.

What are the benefits for us? Like My entire high school Sink in the sea, or for that matter, like any good outsider art, Cryptozoo ends as a window into a decidedly non-commercial mind, and a form of storytelling that isn’t the trained, polished commission effort spawned from animation houses like Disney and DreamWorks. It’s rare to see American animations aimed exclusively at adults, but Cryptozoo is noticeably aimed at an arthouse audience – not only because of the child-unfriendly sexual and violent content here, but also because of the philosophical tendency and complicated shifts in the viewpoint of the entire project.

And after generations of increasingly edited and visually elaborated films from those stores and others they imitate, the raw hand-drawn feel of projects like Cryptozoo can be shocking. It would be easy to call it ugly, but it is more correct to call it idiosyncratic. Certainly the visuals need to be examined much more closely, to see where the textures of paint and pencils give the images a rougher and more specific feel, or where shifts from one style to another – such as the difference between the rough contours of Lauren’s face. and the fine-lined details of Phoebe’s snake hair – give the protagonists even more visual character.

Sometimes the character comes in Cryptozoo recalls the wayang puppet show of Indonesia, with stiff figures moving largely around the joints. Some sequences change in a completely different style, such as the beautiful light show that is performed at one point by a series of conscious light beings. Nothing about where the story is going or how it will stylistically get there can be taken for granted. That’s one of the greatest joys of Shaw’s projects – the sense that something new and different is happening, from that anti-capitalist, anti-conformist, birth control tendency that extends throughout the story and also extends into every aspect of the aesthetic of the movie.

The most appropriate time: Cryptozoo is full of surprising moments and eccentric visuals that creative memers could certainly use again, but perhaps the most obvious moments come when Phoebe’s main snakes bite people. The victims are not only poisoned, their flesh revolts and deforms full 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 looking for distribution.