Review of The Croods (2013)
Seen in 2022.
Seen in 2D.
A family of cavemen, cowering under the local threats that have wiped out their neighbours, encounter a more evolved human who warns of a greater disaster.
Dreamworks’s remake of Blue Sky Studios’s Ice Age (2002) series. Thankfully, 3D animation had come a fair distance in the intervening 11 years.
The writing is an open allegory of modern suburban life. It begins with an emphasis on the late-tween/early-teen perspective through Eep, a refreshingly masculine and unselfconscious female lead, but it ends with a corresponding emphasis on the father’s perspective, which in this allegory is a mid-life crisis. The allegory isn’t fun, nor even preferable to Disney’s closed allegories, but there’s a lot of neat board-driven creature and environmental design in the fanciful landscapes, and anthropomorphism is kept low.
References here: The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021).