Cryptozoo: Fantastic Beasts

Cryptozoo: Fantastic Beasts

We know about outsider art, but is there such a thing as outsider animation? If there is, then Cryptozoo certainly belongs to that category. Hollywood could have done up this fantasia in a more polished and less interesting way, if they went in for animated movies for adults. This opens at Grand Berry Theater this week, and it’s the most affecting animated film I’ve seen so far this year.

After a prologue with two stoned 1960s hippies (voiced by Louisa Krause and Michael Cera) having an encounter with a unicorn that doesn’t go the way they expect, the movie turns into a detective story. Our narrator and protagonist is Lauren Grey (voiced by Lake Bell), a hard-bitten activist who protects griffins, manticores, and other mythic beasts from poachers and black marketeers. She is wounded in a failed attempt to free a captured alkonost, so her boss Joan (voiced by Grace Zabriskie) assigns her a partner named Phoebe (voiced by Angeliki Papoulia), a Gorgon who uses contact lenses and a wig to move through the world without drawing undue attention. Their target is the baku who cured Lauren of her nightmares when she was a little girl. Now the animal is being hunted by the U.S. government for her dream-eating powers.

This is the work of Dash Shaw, the graphic novelist whose animated feature film debut was the occasionally inspired, melodramatically titled My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea. His visual style recalls the 1970s psychedelia of Ralph Bakshi and Eiichi Yamamoto, especially in a scene when Lauren’s quest takes her to a fortune teller (voiced by Zoe Kazan) — her shuffling of the cards in the tarot deck is represented by the cards shuffling themselves in kaleidoscopic patterns. John Carroll Kirby’s score swirling with synthesizers and panpipes is an appropriate touch.

Phoebe is taken aback when she finds out that Lauren and Joan’s planned home for cryptids is a theme park in California, where these beings will be on display or, in some cases, working at the attraction as a way of gradually assimilating into society. The moral ambiguity of this plan makes it sting when Lauren’s nemesis (voiced by Thomas Jay Ryan), a bounty hunter who dreams of using dragons against the Viet Cong and a hydra against antiwar protesters, gives her his version of the “we’re not so different, you and I” speech. (He’s loathsome, but it is funny that he refers to a Pegasus as a “gay horse.”) Even queasier is the revelation that Joan is having sex with one of the cryptids, the fish man of Liérganes. Amid all this, Peter Stormare is highly amusing as the voice of a satyr who is caught up in the plot even though he only thinks about organizing his next sex orgy. Whatever you might think of locking up animals in zoos, you’ll probably agree that letting them all out of their cages at once is a bad idea. Something like that happens in the monster madness climax that makes this movie weirdly like Jurassic Park.

The animation here is not likely to impress anyone with its sophistication, but that seems beside the point. No one goes to Henry Darger’s drawings (this film’s drawing resembles his) for their realistic depictions of people. They go for the totality and extravagance of his vision. So it is with Cryptozoo, which pairs its menagerie of legendary creatures with some pointed commentary about how we care about animals in ways that can be bad for both them and us. If you’re not visited by a baku, this movie may haunt your dreams.

Cryptozoo movie review & film summary (2021)

There’s a little more to Lauren’s story, but not much more. She wants to find the bakku because, when she was a child, it used to eat her dreams with its anteater-like trunk. So Lauren teams up with Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia), a shy gorgon, and Pliny (Emily Davis), a freakish-looking humanoid with a childish face on his chest. There’s no real urgency to Nicole’s bakku quest since “Cryptozoo” has a pothead dream logic that makes it weirdly serene even when Nicholas is threatening to shoot and/or imprison the kinds of monsters you might find in the back pages of some “Dungeons & Dragons”-obsessed kid’s notebook.

“Cryptozoo” might have been more compelling as a collection of static loose-leaf drawings. Shaw’s linework is crude, but he’s also very detail-oriented when it comes to his characters’ ungainly bodies and unnatural features. Like a lot of contemporary indie comics artists, Shaw’s style is somewhere between the underground comix of the 1970s and the superhero comics of the 1960s. That deliberately unbalanced sensibility can be pretty endearing, even if it does often make one wonder why such bizarre-looking characters would ever move or speak like refugees from a formulaic 1980s scifi movie.

Shaw’s characters shuffle across the screen, and when they speak, their oversized lips noticeably stretch their inarticulate faces out of proportion. They also talk like they’re auditioning for the next X-Men movie, like when Phoebe complains to her whiny fiancé Jay (Rajesh Parameswaran) as he agonizes over their upcoming wedding’s seating plan: “At least you have a family. I don’t, because I’m a cryptid.”

Shaw’s characters also sound like uncomfortable professional voice actors, and look like a bored art school student’s pet project. Nicole has the imposing dimensions of a Rubens woman, the chin of a Disney witch, and the curves of a Frazetta heroine. As for Nicholas: his eyes are enormous, his forehead’s got folds like a midwesterner, and his chin looks like a butt. Then again, if that’s how they’re supposed to look, then that’s how they’re supposed to look.

‘Cryptozoo’ Review: Wild Things

Especially valuable is the baku, a mystical pachyderm capable of sucking dreams — and nightmares — straight out of one’s head. Catastrophe is imminent should the beast fall into the wrong hands.

Opposite the “real” world in which cryptids are poached and trafficked is the titular cryptozoo, an amusement park and sanctuary intended to be a steppingstone toward a more integrated world. Here, cryptids of all kinds are commodified into tourist attractions — but at least they do not live in fear.

Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia), a Medusa-like being who passes for human by tranquilizing the snakes atop her head and wrapping them in a head scarf, questions Lauren’s gradualist approach. An exoticized, refugee-like figure, she’s a too-familiar symbol of marginalization that magnifies the film’s schematic political commentary. Caught between an authoritarian state that hates them and a profit-driven liberal project that dehumanizes them, the cryptids are obviously better off fending for themselves. “Jurassic Park,” another film about failed utopias, comes to mind.

Yet “Cryptozoo” stands out as an aesthetically ambitious undertaking, seducing viewers with its hypnotizing hand-drawn animation and John Carroll Kirby’s pulsing electronic score. The story is interestingly windy enough, but it’s these otherworldly sounds and fluidly surreal, pastel-colored images that will leave you entranced.

Cryptozoo

Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.