Mark Reviews Movies: CRYPTOZOO

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 19, 2021

A person should know his or her own limitations. Writer/director Dash Shaw does to a certain extent. He moved into movies from his career as a comic book artist and writer, and in the process of that career, Shaw clearly developed a distinct style. That style—with its almost sketch-like characters, warped proportions, unclear perspective, and occasionally bold colors—is on full display in Cryptozoo, which revolves around cryptids—creatures of rumor, myth, and urban legend that lack a proven existence—and their handlers and their champions and their enemies.

The limitation Shaw doesn't recognize is that his style doesn't exactly lend itself to lengthy exposure or, more importantly, motion. His screenplay begins as a mysterious, occasionally comedic introduction to a world where cryptids actually exist, where two groups are fighting over what to be done with them, and where one of those groups has a "sanctuary" for the creatures in the works. There's a certain storybook quality to the initial plot here, and Shaw's mixture of rough character design, often flat sense of space, and unfilled sketches bursting into fully colored imagery complements that feeling.

Unfortunately, this plot eventually becomes entirely about action—from a lengthy hunt for a particular cryptid, to a series of confrontations over the creature, and finally to an excessively extended climax, as chaos erupts within the eponymous sanctuary/zoo/theme park. From a storytelling level, this metamorphosis doesn't work, because it undoes all of the ideas and limited character development established in the early stages. From a technical level, it simply doesn't work at all. Shaw and animation director Jane Samborski have essentially drawn themselves into a corner, because the writer/director's art style is incompatible with so much and such large-scale action.

An unnecessarily lengthy prologue, which gradually results in a couple (voiced by Louisa Krause and Michael Cera) discovering the Cryptozoo and learning the hard way that a unicorn can be deadly, does at least allow our eyes and brains to become accustomed to the movie's style. Some nice, imaginative touches include a star-filled sky being filled in with outlines of animals and, upon first seeing the unicorn, the rough-sketch quality of the art filling in with detail and color.

The story, apparently set in amidst the cultural and political turmoil of the 1960s, follows Lauren Gray (voice of Lake Bell), who has been searching for cryptids for most of her life—and one, a baku that ate her nightmares when she was a child, in particular. She has partnered with Joan (voice of Grace Zabriskie), the proprietor of the soon-to-be-opened Cryptozoo, to find cryptids and bring them to their new home at the sanctuary, with the hope that its existence will eventually get people accustomed to the idea of living with the creatures.

Looking for the dream-eating creature, Lauren is joined by Phoebe (voice of Angeliki Papoulia), a gorgon who wears contact lenses and tranquilizes her head of snakes. Also hunting for the baku is Nicholas (voice of Thomas Jay Ryan), who is working with the U.S. military to find cryptids so that they can be used to fight real or perceived enemies abroad and at home.

There's an undeniably imaginative quality to some of this. Lauren's contact for the black market of cryptid hunting and selling is Gustav (voice of Peter Stormare), a faun who enjoys lording over orgies and is cynical about the purpose of the zoo. That becomes something of a seemingly significant debate, since Phoebe simply wants a normal life and sees the zoo as a cash-grabbing place that will only assert her role as an "other" in society. The disagreement doesn't matter too much, as the cryptid-hunters travel the globe looking for the baku, and it really doesn't matter as soon as the third act dismisses everything for a series of unconvincing action sequences.

Shaw's designs are given jittery and incomplete motion, as if someone filled in the most significant gaps between one panel of a graphic novel and the next (It doesn't help that the characters' proportions are constantly inconsistent, especially when it comes to Lauren). The effect is intriguing in certain scenes, especially in establishing images (a cutaway view inside an airplane, for example) and ones that don't contain much movement. Everything collapses once these characters have to do anything—from simply walking to all of the theoretical spectacle during the climax.

It would be wrong to call the foundational style of Cryptozoo ugly, simply because it isn't. As for the effect of seeing this style in motion and with so much of it, that's a different story.

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