The Croods

What a tangled production history The Croods went through. With its roots in an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Twits by John Cleese and the director of this picture Kirk DeMicco, it was announced way back in 2005 as Crood Awakening (which they should have stuck with) and was originally to be an Aardman clay animation project, which would have suited it rather well and probably have been better than The Pirates!

Cleese and DeMicco apparently wrote an early draft or two, chiselling out an odd-couple buddy movie script about two cavemen – an inventor and a luddite. The bare bones of that can be seen here, but the final result is rather different, with a family focus that takes that premise and makes it something quite different. Aardman’s association with Dreamworks came to an end, and Lilo & Stitch creator Chris Sanders, who joined as co-creator, wisely prioritised the brilliant How to Train Your Dragon, so production on The Croods slowed to a crawl and only now, in 2013, did the film finally surface.

It’s a little unfortunate, but the fact is that The Croods just gives an immediate impression of mediocrity, a bit like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs did. It doesn’t look like its irreverence has a bit of an edge like Shrek, nor like it might just make you cry like Wall-E or Up. It feels too much like a painful attempt to make a very simple fable into an epic feature film as we join a family of cavemen who live by very strict rules that allow them to survive but never really live – until they are forced out into the open with a slightly unhinged young innovator who knows how to make fire and learn what it really is to push themselves. Its exaggerated but not very appealing designs also simply invite shrugs and indifference on a scale that seems set to be outdone only by the incredibly bland-looking Epic.

But that’s a shame, because The Croods is well worth the watch, and has a lot going for it under the surface. It’s all too polished, yes, and a bit manipulative, but it’s also smart, sweet, wholesome and has some wonderful visuals. It’s not brilliant, but it’s certainly a fair bit above average. It manages to have it all – silly slapstick, character-driven humour, teen romance that works, a positive family message, and even a rather brilliant scene of self-sacrifice that would have been an incredibly moving end to the movie, in a braver world where traumatising children didn’t matter. And so triumphant is what follows that the film gets away with having its cake and eating it.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what prevents the film really hitting the right emotional notes as a whole, but the fact is that it feels too small-scale despite being about characters who believe the end of the world is coming and see destruction that matches it. I thought at first it was that the effects only seem to be affecting so few people, but actually, I think that it’s that the story is so insular. There’s an impression that the feats of the Croods ought to at least bring them to another community, but they are their own little circle, and there is nothing more than that. Thus everything feels limited.

But this is not to say the film is not enjoyable, because it has a whole lot to commend it. Kind acts within a family sometimes are reward enough, and the imaginative creatures that populate the Croodacious period are wonderful – even if I suspect they would have somehow had more impact made of clay than of polygons.  

Lilo & Stitch

Lilo & Stitch has always been the oddball in the Disney family. By design, too – the memorable advertising campaign for the film had Stitch interrupting and ruining key scenes of various Disney Renaissance films, accompanied by posters with the slogan ‘There’s one in every family’. Stitch’s oddness in the Disney canon goes beyond just the intended weirdness of the character, though – there’s not really another Disney film like it, in terms of tone, humour or setting.

Lilo & Stitch is the only one of the post-renaissance films to have really endured, save perhaps Treasure Planet – which was far less critically acclaimed. Atlantis was fairly popular, but certainly not the franchise opportunity Stitch represented. It was quite the brave experiment, but in the right direction, unlike the likes of Home on the Range, the death knell of Disney’s traditional animation department until the recent CPR operation of The Princess and the Frog. Lilo & Stitch belong in the general post-renaissance mood of trying to modernise and offering something different from the rest of the canon, but unlike the other films, really does it right.

Lilo & Stitch is small-budget and small scale. It is not a fair story, or based on one. It is not a fantasy of medieval Europe, nor that fantasy displaced to the far future. It is sci-fi, but based on silly aliens entering the everyday world of modern-day characters. And not just the typical all-American family of live-action Disney: a struggling, ‘broken’ family of just two sisters struggling to make ends meet in Hawaii and avoid social services taking away little Lilo. Artistically, it ignores the Disney house style in favour of big, cute, stylised faces with large round noses and spontaneous watercolour backgrounds. There are no songs in the traditional sense, the music almost entirely diegetic and much of it favourite Elvis hits. And the humour is the glib, snappy, economical humour of films like The Iron Giant or Pixar’s best, which Disney has more whole-heartedly adopted in recent films like Tangled.

And it just works. Stitch is an alien bred purely for destruction by the silly ‘evil genius’ Doctor Jumba, made likeable in part by an eccentric Russian accent provided by David Ogden Stiers, making far more of an impact than he did in Pocahontas. Stitch escapes from captivity and heads to Earth, where he meets cute little Lilo and begins to learn what a family is. Will his destructive impulses get in the way of the understanding between species, will the trouble he causes mean Lilo gets taken away from her sister, and what will happen when the Galactic Federation comes to intervene?

The film keeps things light, apart from the family drama, allowing it to hit much harder than it might have otherwise. The aliens are always silly and largely incompetent, and Stitch never seems overly dangerous – especially because he’s very cute. The humour shines through and though you never get the impression the world has been saved, life in a little family has been made better and some powerful people were made to think twice. It’s neat, paced well, and satisfies.

It’s interesting to note, too, that while Stitch has been a modest success in the English-speaking world, the Far East have Stitch-mania to an extreme. So while you may find one or two items in a high street Disney store in a Western city, the Chinatown will probably have numerous bootleg goods with his face on it. The craze seems to be tied in with Japan’s gyaru movement and their love of Hawaii, but has swept over every part of East Asia I’ve been to, even rural Taiwan. Madhouse even made their own spin-off where instead of Hawaii Stitch goes to Okinawa. And then of course Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep has a full world with Stitch characters and sets lovingly recreated from the film. On the other hand, the Far East seems to love Mickey Mouse in a way kids in the West don’t seem to have for a good seventy years…

Stitch’s legacy is quite unusual in Disney’s canon and will undermine many generalisations about the studio’s output. That can only be a good thing in my eyes, and there’s no doubt the studio’s 2000-2010 output, especially considered without Pixar, would be far weaker without it.

How to Train Your Dragon

I initially dismissed How to Train Your Dragon, unimpressed by the trailer, but exceptional word-of-mouth made me reconsider, and I'm very pleased that I did, because this is an excellent film. For once the 3D worked well for me, and the effects blew the obviously tacked-on post-production 3D of Clash of the Titans away. The water in particular looked magnificent. It was great to see an animated character acting in a naturalistic way, and I ended up very fond of Hiccup, as well as the adorably feline Toothless.

I don’t know why cartoon Vikings are always Scottish, except when they’re young and attractive, when they become Americans, but it worked. I loved the society, the different designs, the fun of it and the emotional ups and downs. Where I was willing Hiccup to make a grand gesture or come up with a story, only for him not to, it made perfect sense because of his character. And the ending was satisfying, though I hope it spawns a sequel, and find it great that it looked likely to be a failure, only to gradually pick up a wider and wider audience.

A simple story of an outcast of society choosing his own way and eventually winning over his detractors, with a little help from a dragon, it is one of the better animated films of recent years, and certainly my favourite from Dreamworks.

(originally written April 16, 2010. Two sequels have since been announced.)