Cryptozoan criticism: the rare animated film strictly for adults

The Polygon entertainment team is connected to the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, which became virtual for the first time. Here’s what you need to know about the indie gems that will soon hit streaming services, cinemas and the cinematic zeitgeist.

Logline: In a world secretly full of mythical monsters, three women try to round up the strange surviving creatures and take them to a sanctuary where people can enjoy them in peace. A military bounty hunter has more brutal plans for the trio.

Longerline: Dash Shaw, the comic book artist and independent animator behind the fun and bizarre of 2016 My whole school sinking into the sea, returns with Cryptozoan, which is equally affected, wild and unpredictable. Opening in a dream sex scene, where partners Amber (Louisa Krause) and Matthew (Michael Cera) are naked in the woods at night and dream of an ideal hippie future of world peace and equality, the film takes a grotesquely bloody turn almost immediately . They live in an ugly world that doesn’t respect high ideals and cool vibes. Crypt hunter Lauren Gray (Lake Bell) certainly knows this: since childhood, when a Japanese dream-eating creature named baku saved her from nightmares, Lauren tries to protect the cryptids from capture, exploitation and killing.

It’s hard work, because locals around the world tend to capture cryptids for nefarious purposes and because Lauren’s opposite, Nick (Thomas Jay Ryan), follows her around the world, collecting her findings for the U.S. military. He wants baku in particular because he believes it could be used to erase “counterculture dreams” and end leftist protests forever. Lauren ends up chasing the baku right in front of him, with the help of the gorgon Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia), her old idealistic patron Joan (Grace Zabriskie), and the unreliable mercenary faun Gustav (Peter Stormare).

Image: Sundance Institute

Which is Cryptozoan trying to do? The film is nominally an adventure story, complete with shootings, punch fights, crypto-crypto massacres and a search that ends badly for many humans and creatures. But it also has a strong anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian streak that extends not only to the military-industrial complex, but more generally, to the relationship of humanity with animals in general. When Phoebe sees the Cryptozoo about to open, the sanctuary where Joan is harboring dozens of oddities, some with human intelligence, the gorgon is deeply disappointed. She recalls that it looks more like a mall than a haven. And it does – it’s full of strip malls and secondary carnival shows, with Lauren bragging that they sell toys modeled after each confirmed cryptid. The extravagant zoo may not be your ideal form of protection, but it is necessary, she says – you have to earn money to support yourself.

While Cryptozoo himself is built around this compromise between idealism and practicality, Joan is a purebred type whose worldview revolves around love. She has a passionate and supportive relationship with one of her cryptids and is convinced that the world’s problems can be solved with more of these types of connections. But she and her fellow conservationists may be benefiting more than cryptids. The film eventually suggests that trying to contain them is not helping them at all. Shaw recognizes Lauren’s heroism in facing predators who see every creature and person around her in terms of profit. But even she receives harsh criticism from Nick, who feels he is doing the job for both his own peace of mind and raw emotion.

The quote that says it all: “We can only greet the strange and unusual with love. And if we show love to them, they will return love. And love will spread and involve all beings in our diverse and wonderful world. “

Image: Sundance Institute

Does he get there? CryptozoanMorale’s may seem nebulous in the midst of all the action and incident, which seems more focused on communicating the widely varied personalities and goals of its characters than on finding a similarity between them. This leaves the narrative looking more realistic than a common adventure story, but also more confusing and more subject to distractions, like a subplot around Phoebe’s impending wedding that doesn’t have much value. Protective cryptids are not a unified or even focused group, they are a handful of temporary allies who do not fully agree with the methodology or purpose, except when the situation becomes serial.

The pace also varies widely – the woody opening idyll looks like a leisurely tale, with Matthew standing naked at the top of the high cryptzoan fence like just a lovely dream image in a long sequence of them. But a confrontation between Lauren and Nick over a Russian woman-bird hybrid called alkonost looks more like an episode of Raiders of the Lost Ark, complete with Belloq advancing to grab the idol after Indy did all the hard work. The film goes back and forth between the action and the logic of dreams, and between the adoption of high ideals and watching people suffer as they try and fail to achieve them. It is certainly a cynical story – Shaw’s script has little faith in his heroes’ ability to save the day or his good intentions when trying.

What does this bring us? Very similar My entire school Sinking in the sea, or like any good external art, Cryptozoan it ends up as a window to a decidedly non-commercial mind and a way of telling stories that is not the polished and practiced committee effort that comes out of animation houses like Disney and DreamWorks. It is rare to see American animation focused solely and specifically on adults, but Cryptozoan it is visibly focused on an art audience – not just because of the sexual and violent content hostile to children here, but because of the philosophical inclination of the whole project and the complicated shifts in view.

And after generations of films increasingly processed and visually elaborated by these establishments and others imitating them, the harsh sensation of drawings like Cryptozoan it can be shocking. It would be easy to call it ugly, but it is more correct to call it idiosyncratic. Certainly visuals need a much more detailed examination, to see where the textures of paints and pencils give images a rougher and more specific feel, or where they change from one style to another – like the difference between the rough contours of a person’s face. Lauren and the lined detail of Phoebe’s snake hair – gives the protagonists even more visual character.

Sometimes the movement of the character in Cryptozoan reminiscent of Wayang puppets from Indonesia, with rigid figures moving mostly around the joints. Some sequences take on a completely different style, such as the beautiful light show presented at one point by a series of conscious light creatures. Nothing about where the story is going or how it will arrive stylistically can be taken for granted. This is one of the greatest joys of Shaw’s projects – the feeling of something new and different happening, that anti-capitalist, anti-conformist and anti-containment trend that extends throughout history, also extending to all aspects of the aesthetic of the movie.

The most capable moment of memes: Cryptozoan it’s full of surprising moments and weird visuals that creative memers could certainly reuse, but perhaps the most obvious come when Phoebe’s head snakes bite people. Victims are not just poisoned, their flesh revolts and distorts, becoming full Akira. The image is a good setting for a “Oh no, the consequences of my own actions!” Style meme.

When can we see this? Cryptozoan is looking for distribution.