This piece was first published on Ryan’s blog.
I am too late for this article to be considered relevant for The Croods‘ time and place. It left theaters nearly two years ago, its home video release hit the shelves a year ago, and even though The Academy nominated it for Best Animated Feature (and of course it didn’t win, and that shit doesn’t matter anyway, “LOOK DRE$$ES!”), I still missed my chance to tell you why it should be relevant to OUR time and place due to its fascinating, if perhaps coincidental, thinky bits. Regardless, you managed to stumble onto this particular venue for film nerdage and are now rendered HELPLESS TO READING! … as helpless as this film’s vision of the male social conservative in his inevitable extinction.
You cannot escape, and neither can he!
I wasn’t exactly losing my waste in anticipation of what appeared to be CGI Flinstones. The trailer hinted at only a couple decent gags, a few lovely images, and almost certainly me… taking my girlfriend to see it. All were achieved, and in high quantities. There are nearly endless visual delights like the cream sandwiched between funny-funny-funny-funny cookies made of jokes. We’re not just talking about little Snickerdoodles, here. We’ve got full-on Guffaw Macaroons. The 3D beepy boops required to create such visuals do a marvelous service to the fun. From one Mario World-esque stage to another (I have never seen water so blue and inviting), the viewer’s desire to enter this universe increases. And what a damn big stride this movie has! Hardly a minute is wasted as it delivers one adventure, joke, ridiculous prehistoric nonsense animal, or character development after another. It’s as rich in realized and charming characters as it is in creative beasts of a time that never existed. Really, I think it’s the most inventive design since the Jim Henson Creature Shop days. I often thought of the far less exciting Dark Crystal; the way our human protagonists avoid the gaping mouth of a quadrupedal Land-Whale only to be throttled by a Chicken-Ram. It’s a vision of evolution’s prepubescent transition out of weirdhood, wherein planet earth has been sewing its wildest oats for some time now. This earth starts to crumble, and the Croods, the last family of Neanderthals, are forced out of the only lifestyle they know: The safety of the familiar.
Intrepid teenager, Eep (Emma Stone), would give anything to leave the cave, which her classic patriarch, Grug (Nicolas Cage), has taught his entire brood to never do for fear they might experience something new and die. That is literally the moral of every nightly story Grug tells his family. This is the Antiquated Man. He is today’s social conservative. We aren’t privy to his stance on something like gay or women’s rights, but this is a man clearly stuck in the past. He lives in fear of a world that exists outside of the one he built himself, though he means well. Grug is further characterized as the perfect conservative in that he passionately believes he can best serve a safe future in keeping his family ignorant of new and different experiences, perspectives, cultures and beliefs. This newness is mostly wrought in the form of Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a roaming Homo-sapien (or… something… let’s not worry too much about the science. We’re talking about a movie showcasing an animal that is basically two lemurs… that create one… because they are connected at the ends of their tails. I know. That IS fucking weird), who is on a mission to find “Tomorrow” and warns them of the end of all things safe and square. Relative to Grug, at least, this is modern man. Guy introduces them to fire, he tells inspirational and poetic stories, and he has already invented shoes, belts, stilts, and… some sort of defibrillation. He is everything that can allow an individual to survive in a growing and diversifying landscape. To Grug’s disgrace, his family now turns to a leader who is willing to move forward.
Moving on… that pesky thing about progress.
At a gut-wrenching near-tragic climax, we find Grug, the man of the past, literally on the wrong side of history. He has changed along their journey, but we still find him unable to adapt. He has used what he knows best to get his family to safety (hurling them from the crumbling side of a gaping chasm onto terra firma in a fine display of masculinity), but this has trapped him: doomed as a fossil. Calling for him through their tears, the rest of the Croods are shown begging him to join them in a new world. The movie, in typical children’s cinema form, has a far more optimistic view than I for the fate of The Antiquated Man. I won’t completely spoil the end of the film because it’s really a lot of fun, but in short, Grug does learn to adapt and join the rest of his race in the future. He manages to bring his essential self combined with the spirit of change into the future. This is what conservative mankind must do in order to live among the denizens of a world that is ready to evolve.
