95 min | NR | August 20, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
A cryptozookeeper travels the world capturing mythical creatures and locking them inside a sanctuary built to keep them safe. Dash Shaw paints the whole utopia by hand and asks whether a cage with good intentions is still a cage. The animation runs wilder than anything it gets wrapped around.
Cryptozoo is a hand-painted animated feature about a hidden sanctuary that shelters cryptids, the mythical creatures of folklore. Lauren Grey hunts these beings across the world and brings them behind the gates of a zoo built to keep them safe. The owners imagine the cryptozoo as a utopia where the strange and the persecuted finally exist in the open. The film doubts that promise from the first frame. A sanctuary is still an enclosure, and an enclosure built by humans answers to human appetites. This is an anti-capitalist fable about the impossibility of caging wonder without selling it.
Lake Bell voices Lauren Grey with a tired conviction that keeps the character honest. She believes in the rescue and lets the doubt surface only in the pauses. Zoe Kazan voices Magdalene, a gorgon who passes among humans, with a soft ache about belonging to neither world. Michael Cera voices Matthew in his familiar halting register, and the film uses that blankness to unsettle. Thomas Jay Ryan voices Nicholas with a flat institutional calm that makes his menace bureaucratic rather than loud. The vocal cast underplays throughout, which lets the images carry the strangeness.
Dash Shaw writes and directs, and his pictures look like nothing else in animation. The backgrounds are painted in loose watercolor washes that bleed and pool around hard ink outlines. Figures stay flat and graphic while the environments behind them swim with texture and color. Shaw stages the cryptozoo itself as a theme park, complete with maps and attractions and gift-shop logic, and the design turns the sanctuary into a product. The hand-made quality refuses the smoothness of digital animation and insists on the human hand in every frame. The result feels built rather than rendered.
The trouble is that the story moves on rails the visuals never touch. Shaw builds a conventional chase around a single creature and a single threat, and the plot hits its beats on schedule. The ideas about commodification and refuge run richer than the narrative that carries them. Still, the film earns its strangeness through sheer craft and conviction. Cryptozoo wants to imagine a world that protects its monsters and stays clear-eyed about why that world cannot hold. The pictures linger longer than the plot does.