Cryptozoo is an animated movie … Stop! It’s not the place to park the kids on Saturday afternoon with jumbo popcorns. It’s got sex scenes between humans, a glimpse of consenting interspecies sex and lots of scarlet ink representing bloodshed. Cryptozoo is about beings with unusual powers … Stop! Iron Man and his pals would be lost in this universe. Even the Dark Knight might be puzzled.
Written and directed by graphic novelist Dash Shaw with animation from Jane Samborski, Crytozoo presents a sequence of incidents that would look good and read well as a graphic novel. It’s unlike any animated motion picture I know in form as well as content. Visually it encompasses a rich set of contrasts in color and texture, moving figures and morphing abstractions. It’s often beautiful to look at as the story unfolds in unusual directions.
Cryptozoo opens with a young couple camping in dark woods, Amber (voiced by Louisa Krause) and Matthew (Michael Cera). He’s stupidly naïve. “Nothing natural can hurt us,” he insists. She disagrees. It’s disconcerting to hear him relate the revolutionary dream he just had—of storming the Capitol past the cops into the halls of power, but soon we figure it’s the late ‘60s and he’s talking Vietnam, not overturning the election. He wants to change the world. She replies, “Utopias never work.”
Fence-climbing into a restricted area, Amber and Matthew see a unicorn and he foolishly approaches, never thinking it’s a wild animal that will gore him with its horn. Nature can hurt us. And soon enough, dreams of utopia unravel.
Enter Cryptozoo’s protagonist: not Amber (she disappears and reemerges only at the end) but Lauren (Lake Bell). She’s part of a covert organization dedicated to keeping safe the cryptids—the fantastic creatures unacknowledged by science that live in mythology, legend and fairytale. Dragons, krakens, sentient fireballs, elves—people fear them when they dare imagine they might be real. And the U.S. military is rounding them up as potential “bio-weapons.” Maybe dragons can flush the Vietcong from the Vietnamese jungle and many-headed Hydra rout the protestors on America’s streets.
Lauren is especially concerned with rescuing a baku, the Japanese being who rescued her childhood by sucking the nightmares from her dreamworld through its trunk. She’s assisted by Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia), a gorgon with deadly snake hair concealed beneath a headscarf. She can turn men to stone but she’s facing an army.
Cryptozoo becomes as morally complicated as Christopher Nolan’s Batman. Lauren’s with the good guys but the good guys are building a zoo for the cryptids with plans to unveil it as a “tourist friendly” destination, its creatures enclosed within simulacra of their natural habitat arranged by continent (vendors will sell “culturally appropriate food”) and a giftshop hawking dolls of each cryptid species. The project’s head, Joan (Grace Zabriskie), speaks of “showing love” to the cryptids (“and love will spread”).
The zoo is a mash-up of ‘60s utopianism and 21st century venture philanthropy. It’s a sanctuary but a prison. Some of the characters Lauren and Phoebe encounter on their journey, including the problematic mother of a boy whose face is in his abdomen, insist that the cryptids would rather roam free.
In shakier hands, Lauren could be a feminist-animal rights action figure but the screenplay slips free from cliché. When Lauren talks with Phoebe in a poll-dancing bar, male objectification bounces between female agency. Cryptozoo is a conversation, not a sermon.
If Lauren stands for misguided good and the American agent Nic (Thomas Jay Ryan) for rationalized evil, flitting between them is a character in deep moral twilight. Gustav (Peter Stormare) is a cynical faun, rescued by Lauren but willing to sell out his fellow cryptids to support his hedonistic life.
Cryptozoo’s animation is magical in its best scenes suggesting patterns in nature for those who see them and dangers for those who don’t look close enough.
Crytozoo opens in theaters on Aug. 20.
