ANI-MOVIES, *The Croods

The only way they could get Nicolas "effing" Cage to be even more Nicholas "effing" Cage was if they had him play a cartoon caveman version of himself! Directors and screenwriters Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders came up with this update on The Flinstones, but this modern stone age family don't live in a stonepunk civilization and are in constant danger of going extinct. The Croods from Dreamworks went on to make theatrical sequel, plus two separate animated TV series, one a prequel to the first and the other a continuation of the sequel movie. The 2013 film released with a booming success making more than three times its budget back from box office sales. The plan at first was to make The Croods a stop motion production with Aardman Animations at the helm and even featuring John Cleese and based it on a Roald Dahl book titled The Twits, although this wouldn't get its own animated movie until 2025 when it premiered on Netflix. Aardman instead went on to make Early Man about cavemen meeting civilized humans and starting the game of soccer, all this while Dreamworks rewrote the original pitch into their own distinct movie. Instead of ex-Monty Pythoners, the cast features Nicholas Cage as the caveman dad, Emma Stone as the rebellious older daughter, Ryan Reynolds as a lone teenager who has been surviving on his own, plus Cloris Leachman voicing yet again another grandma character which she practically made a career out of.

A prehistoric family living in the time that the continenets were drifting apart, the Croods are the only remaining humans in their neighborhood as the rest of the humans were either killed by the local wildlife or died of infection. The ever-shifting landscape causes the Crood's cave collapsing, so they head out into the open world to find a new cave. The elder daughter Eep comes across the slightly more informed boy called Guy who told her about upcoming natural disasters, and gains the rest of the Crood's trust when he shows them he can make fire as well as making shoes out of dead animals so they can walk on bumpy terrain. The father Grug realizes he has been holding back his family by having them constantly hiding in caves instead of actually living and eventually comes around to Guy's way of thinking. The whole crew of Croods find a safe sanctuary near a tall mountain and end up adopted several different animals as pets.

The Croods is both an entertaining animated film while also being an enchanting visual experience. The character designs are standard cartoon types you would expect from a Dreamworks production from the 2010sm, but the landscape, backgrounds, and bizarre Seuss-like creatures seem like they come from a holistically different movie. The film won several animation awards, but 20th Century Fox failed to bother doing any genuine merchandising to draw any real attention to its initial release which has made the movie a hidden gem despite all of its animated spinoffs. On its own, the original movie is an uncanny family adventure that is replayable.