Last year, DreamWorks Animation celebrated its 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Callie Petch has been going through their entire animated canon, one film a week for the next 30 weeks, and giving them a full-on retrospective treatment. Prior entries can be found here, should you desire.
26] The Croods (22nd March 2013)
Budget: $135 million
Gross: $587,204,668
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 70%
Lilo & Stitch takes its time before revealing its heart. Oh, sure, its appearance is obvious from pretty much the start of the film, but the true extent of its heart isn’t revealed until later into the movie. Firstly disarming and softening up the audience with extremely funny comedy and then, when their guards are down, putting them through the emotional ringer. It swings for the fences – of course it does, it’s a Disney movie, that’s what they do – but waits until such a time that the act is earned. It’s also a flawlessly constructed film that never puts a foot wrong, contradicts itself or bends the world to the will of its protagonists, but the tone and heart reveal is still mighty important.
By contrast, How to Train Your Dragon, after its purposefully chaotic opening scene, wastes no time revealing its heart. If Lilo & Stitch hides the extent of its heart and then gradually rolls up its sleeve, How to Train Your Dragon rips off its sleeve at the outset and spends its runtime shoving it in your face screaming, “LOOK AT IT! LOOK AT MY HEART AND EMOTIONS!” It swings for the fences from the outset over everything which makes certain scenes and gestures feel unearned because its prior swinging for the fences ends up accidentally robbing certain scenes of their impact. In other words, the Stoick and Hiccup stuff doesn’t work because Stoick is mostly just a one-dimensional disapproving jackass until he isn’t, which makes him insufferable until the switch and makes the switch itself ring hollow. It’s also a problematic film that doesn’t quite work, due to it contradicting itself, bending the world to the will of its protagonist, and that certain other thing that I still can’t explain, but I know I’m in the minority on all of this.
Of these two approaches, The Croods opts for the first, which itself is a smart idea – and before I go on, I must stress that I say this because I prefer films with pacing, not because I think that all animation should be like Disney; I don’t think that. But it also tries something different than the prior two, it rarely swings for the fences with its heart. Oh, it still swings for the fences with its comedy, which is broad and loud and very physical in nature, but when it does reveal its giant beating heart, it’s decidedly more reserved, more understated. There are still grand emotional gestures and BIG scenes, but in a way that doesn’t feel as pervasive as in those other two movies.
Now, of course, this might also be down to my own personal baggage. Lilo & Stitch’s heart trades on the bond between a “pet” and their owner, and the general bond of a family regardless of how non-traditional they may be – which both worked, and still do work, gangbusters for me. Whilst How To Train Your Dragon’s heart trades on the bond between a “pet” and their owner, and the approval of and bonding between a father and son – the second of which, as previously discussed in detail and thanks to personal stuff, does not work for me. The Croods’ heart, by contrast, focusses solely on dad Grug’s attempts to protect and earn love from his family. It doesn’t have a secondary outlet for its heart, like those other films do, especially since Eep is way less important to the film than she first appears (more on that shortly), and my general disinterest with tales about fathers and father figures in media may explain why I found the heart of this film less in-my-face than in Lilo & Stitch.
Not to say that it doesn’t work, mind. The Croods pulls it off spectacularly well, which is why I rate the film so highly, but that’s probably why I find it more quietly moving instead of openly moving. Looking at family through the perspective of women, and especially sisters and mother figures, touches and interests me based on my own experiences, so Lilo & Stitch’s heart piledrives me into the middle of next week. I am a dog owner back home, so that part of How To Train Your Dragon’s heart shivs me in the gut. But father figures have never held as much of an impact for me as I was primarily raised by my mother, so The Croods’ heart makes me warm and fuzzy but not as majorly as in those prior films.
Those of you who do not obsessively follow along to director’s credits in animated movies may be wondering why I have spent so long comparing The Croods to How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch. Well, each of those films share a co-writer/co-director in the shape of one Chris Sanders. Sanders began his career as a character designer for criminally forgotten 1980s kids TV series Muppet Babies, before making the transition to Walt Disney Feature Animation during their Renaissance in the 90s, working predominately on story for The Rescuers Down Under, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast, along with helping script Mulan. In the late-90s, Sanders was approached by then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner to direct his own film, under the provision that its budget would be lower than typical Disney fare ($80 mil for Stitch vs. $130 mil for Tarzan). Dean DeBlois would eventually be brought on to co-write and co-direct, and the results would come forth in 2002’s very successful Lilo & Stitch.
Then, however, something happened. Sanders had started significant work on American Dog, a film about a Hollywood star dog who gets lost in the desert. By the time that it came to screen the film to higher-up executives, control of Disney’s feature animation division had switched from Michael Eisner to Bob Iger, and ex-Pixar head John Lasseter – who, according to rumours that I can’t substantiate, was allegedly not a fan of Lilo & Stitch – was brought on as Chief Creative Officer of the studio. These test screenings did not go well and Sanders was inundated with notes and suggestions. According to Lasseter, Lee Unkrich, and several other animators, but not Sanders himself – he has stayed quiet on the issue – Sanders actively resisted these changes and was removed from the film. Soon after, Sanders negotiated his release from Disney and signed onto DreamWorks.
(Because I know you’re curious: American Dog was handed over to Chris Williams of The Emperor’s New Groove and Byron Howard of Tangled, re-tooled significantly in the space of just 18 months, and released as the mild 2008 hit Bolt.)
Upon joining DreamWorks, Sanders got to work on Crood Awakenings, which itself has had a tumultuous road to being a finished product. First announced in 2005, the film was to be another entry into DreamWorks’ five-picture deal with Aardman Animations, with a script by Racing Stripes and Quest for Camelot writer Kirk DeMicco and John Cleese. The pair had been trying to get a film version of Roald Dhal’s The Twits made, which lead to DreamWorks getting a hold of their script and inviting the pair to work on an idea of the company’s, them both settling on the germ of an idea that would grow into The Croods. Of course, the Aardman angle didn’t pan out – more on that in the Flushed Away entry – and the rights reverted back to DreamWorks.
Enter Chris Sanders in March of 2007. DreamWorks’ newest signee was barely in the door and already chomping at the bit to get to work on a new film, even planning on significantly re-writing the film in question. This was to be Sanders’ big new pet project… and then How to Train Your Dragon happened. Prior to Sanders and DeBlois coming aboard, the project was allegedly a mess and needed a total overhaul, with Co-President for Production Bill Damaschke believing Sanders to be the best man for the job. Sanders called in DeBlois, the duo remade and re-tooled How to Train Your Dragon in the space of a year, it received critical acclaim and financial success, and then, with DeBlois staying on Dragon duty, Sanders moved back to The Croods, with DeMicco returning to the project in a co-writer/co-director capacity.
The resulting film… is nowhere near as monumental or interesting as its journey into existence, hence the last page of content. Isn’t it interesting to see how chaotic the world of animation can get, though? Look, I like The Croods – I think that it’s a very funny, very well-animated, and surprisingly moving film – but there’s not really much to say about it because it doesn’t swing for the fences. It tries to be lower-key in nearly every facet, a film that works as entertaining entertainment and not much more. It succeeds, and I must respect a film that knows its limits and doesn’t try to be something that it’s not, but that automatically makes it the least interesting of Chris Sanders’ projects to talk about. Lilo & Stitch is an amazing movie that I could talk for hours about, How to Train Your Dragon has its conflicted push-pull nature and problematic issues that keep it from greatness which makes it interesting to talk about, The Croods… has clever character animation? Where the titular family only occasionally walk like recognisable humans, instead remaining in their less-developed Neanderthal states.
The one really interesting thing about the film that I can go into detail about is with regards to the film’s main character. Now, going into this film, I had been led to believe that Eep, the daughter of the clan voiced by Emma Stone, was the lead character of the film. The marketing had said so, the entire premise of the film hinged on her, and Sanders had worked with female protagonists before with Lilo & Stitch – Lilo’s arc in that film being just as vital and central to the film as Stitch’s. I even noted The Croods down in my Monsters vs. Aliens piece as one of 11 animated films in the last decade to feature lead female protagonists that aren’t princesses (because this medium does have a gender problem).
Turns out that a severe hoodwinking has been ongoing as Eep is not the protagonist of The Croods. Instead, she’s the perspective of The Croods, she’s how we see the family and how we’re supposed to feel about them changes as her thoughts on them change. She provides the bookending narration speeches that animated films are overly fond of nowadays, but her arc is relatively minor, learning to not resent her father so much, and she’s shuffled back into the deck once the real narrative momentum kicks in. She is not our protagonist. Our protagonist is actually Grug, the Nicholas Cage voiced patriarch of the family, and his arc – where he learns that change and new are not necessarily bad things, and that being overly protective is going to drive his family away from him – is the one that gets the lion’s share of the screen time.
Now, yes, I was and still am disappointed by this reveal. Animation has a major gender problem – there’s nothing wrong with princesses as a concept, but there is something wrong when they are the only option available – and there should be more female-led and female-focussed and female-created animation out there. Going to all of the effort of making out an animated film to be about the lead female character only to have the actual film side-line her in favour of focussing near-exclusively on the father – and the boy that she’s fascinated by and sweet on, Guy – feels like, for lack of a better phrase, a real dick move.
That being said, the stuff with Grug is really well-done, enlivened by the fact that we are encouraged to look at him primarily through Eep’s eyes. Grug starts the film as a real irritant, a drag whose desire to protect his family crosses the line from nobly intentioned to selfishly suffocating, but he’s not solely that. He’s capable of being funny, his tight-knit plans do help the family to survive in certain cases, and he does truly care. But because we see him through Eep’s eyes, we also see how his intentions can be perceived by people who aren’t as fanatically devoted to him. It keeps the viewer at that distance since, otherwise, the film runs the risk of becoming a “Father Knows Best, You Silly Women” story instead of a tale about a father learning to loosen his control on the world, accept change and tell his family every once in a while that he does truly love them.
The film commits to this too. Grug comes further and further to the forefront as the film progresses. First becoming petty, out-of-his-element, and spiteful over the world telling him that his daughter and the new man taking charge of his family’s life are both right; eventually softening, working through his issues, and becoming a more noble and tolerant member of the family. Each stage corresponds to Eep’s relationship with Grug, with the tonal handling of the whole affair – first wacky comedy, then pathetic bitter alienator, awkward cringe comedy, and finally genuine heartfelt sincerity – providing a strong marker for how far along his road he is.
It all leads up to the sequence in which Grug selflessly throws the clan and Guy across the chasm, recognising that he can’t adapt and that the best thing that could happen for the family that he cares for is to sacrifice himself to save them. That’s the moment in which The Croods reveals that it’s been buttering up the audience for a genuine emotional payoff, and it’s a legitimately moving sequence. I was even genuinely fooled into thinking that this was the film’s endgame. The film is building, from pretty much the outset, to some kind of grand gesture that puts Grug back into the genuine best interests of the family without suffocating them, and this seemed to be it. I genuinely thought that we would end with Grug dead and the family making a new life for themselves in the new world, especially since there is no full-on antagonist for the film; wise move.
I mean, it obviously wasn’t going to, this is a family film after all and family animation rarely seems to want to push itself to as dark places as the medium and genre used to, but I believed it might, which is a credit to the film’s writing, pacing, and individual scene direction. Therefore, as legitimately sweet as the final 15 minutes are, they still feel a little extraneous; the film rewarding Grug’s redemption and selfless act of kindness by reuniting him with those he values most. Not helped, mind you, by the fact that his story offers three separate endings of varying quality for Grug before it settles on the Second Chance ending. Again, it’s my fault for thinking that this light-hearted family comedy would end in a way that could even be remotely construed as bittersweet, but it still feels like punch-pulling.
Then again, if it had, audiences probably wouldn’t have kept coming back. Yes, at the time when DreamWorks needed it most – mainly because of what’s to come, which we mostly won’t be covering here – The Croods was an out-of-the-box hit. It opened to a great $43 million, comfortably beating the rest of the chart, and the typical strong DreamWorks hold – even major underperformers like Mr. Peabody & Sherman (32%), Rise of the Guardians (43.7%), and next week’s Turbo (35.5%) rarely drop more than 50% between opening and second weekends – was bolstered by a near-total lack of competition and strong audience reception, helping it to a very strong 10-week run on the Top 10. It would close a hair’s breadth away from $190 million domestic. Overseas, the film also did excellently, securing another $400 million, and making The Croods the ninth highest-grossing DreamWorks film worldwide.
So, why? Why The Croods? This is the through-line for the final leg of this series, after all; why The Croods was majorly successful and yet Turbo and Rise of the Guardians were not? Well, much like with the film itself, the answers are pretty obvious and unspectacular, but you can’t exactly dispute what you’re seeing because, hey, they work, don’t they? First off, the release date: end of March. Same release date as the first How to Train Your Dragon, which worked gangbusters before and why not stake out a little patch of Chris Sanders’ own? Plus, it was also the first proper animated film of 2013, Escape from Planet Earth came and went with almost literally no fuss a month earlier, and the next film for release, Epic by Blue Sky, wasn’t due for two full months which, in box office land, is practically an automatic monopoly for whatever did take its slot.
(Side Bar Notice, real quick: after Rise of the Guardians, DreamWorks Animation had fulfilled their contract with Paramount and, thanks to Paramount offering them a poor deal and wishing to make their own in-house animation studio, the company switched distributors to 20th Century Fox, where The Croods was distributed. 20th Century Fox also own Blue Sky, makers of Epic, so this release date will have been strategically determined and deliberated on majorly for a long, long time. In fact, with the exception of next week’s Turbo, one can’t really foot the blame on DreamWorks’ underperformance with release dates, Fox have been really good to them with that. Anyways…)
Second off, marketing. If you haven’t yet, scroll back up and watch the first trailer for this film. Yes, it recalls the tone of How to Train Your Dragon, but the tone of How to Train Your Dragon is also markedly different to anything DreamWorks have cooked up, especially in regards to the marketing. The comedy isn’t excessively broad, that wondrous sense of discovery that the film has is on display, it doesn’t give away every beat and every gag but the audience knows what they’re in for, which is what Rise of the Guardians didn’t do and consequently paid a heavy price for it. It’s a good trailer, it’s a strong trailer, and other types of marketing were bloody everywhere come release time, you couldn’t move for advertising material of some kind for The Croods. Fox put their all into the marketing for this one and did so in a way that differentiated the film from the accepted tired DreamWorks formula without confusing or leaving the audience in the dark.
And third off, it’s a funny heart-warming film about family by a really talented storyteller. Of course it was going to do well! Good films about families will always, always bond with the movie-going public. They’re sweet and sincere in a way that resonates harder with audiences because the typical audience for animated features nowadays are families. It allows the heart to cross age levels, tap into insecurities in all generations, go broad but not gross with the humour because most audience members need to get every joke, and just generally be true family viewing. Why do you think Paddington is still raking in all of the money ever?
The Croods is small and intimate and character-focussed, which is something that family filmmaking has mostly forgotten nowadays in search of spectacle, but the ones that do remember are the ones that end up making the most cash. There is spectacle in The Croods, that $135 million budget is not just from it being eight bloody years in the making, but it never drowns out that character-focussed centre, and those are the films that stick with people and the families that the film is aimed at. I don’t think The Croods is brilliant, not by any stretch of the term, but it is very good for thuddingly obvious reasons that become clear when watched, and the reason why The Croods was a major success is not because of any fancy formula. It’s just a very good film, marketed brilliantly with a clear target audience that it speaks directly to, released at a perfect time.
Next week, we close out the film side of this series by looking at a film with poor marketing, a target audience that no longer exists, that was released at the single worst possible time. Did Turbo deserve the death march that it was forced down, and could anything have been done to stop it?
A new entry in The DreamWorks Animation Retrospective will be posted every Monday at 1PM BST.
Callie Petch lost someone they could have saved.
Callie Petch 