Reseñas de la crítica

Utterly bizarre in the best possible way, this lovingly handmade animated feature by writer-director Dash Shaw (originally a comic book/graphic novelist) isn’t like anything you’ve seen before.

Touching, in a novel, original and often humorous way, on issues such as the encroachment of the military, environmental protection, bio-diversity, gender and queer identity, Cryptozoo is an exhilarating dream for our times – that does not end into a nightmare.

This psychedelic paean to biodiversity and acceptance in a xenophobic world is alternately marvelous and messy. Its freewheeling storytelling often feels slapdash, its hippy-dippy earnestness a touch simplistic and its central allegory is lifted straight out of X-Men. But there’s a nonstop fusillade of imagination at work here that commands attention, even when the balance of art-school inventiveness and child-like fantasy threatens to topple into chaos.

It might be easy for some to write off Cryptozoo’s Adult Swim-adjacent animation style and deadpan dialogue as simple quirk, but its potent mix of spy and adventure movie tropes, interspersed with thoughtful discussion of zoological ethics, reveals a movie with a lot on its mind, both formally and thematically.

Yet for all this thoughtful plotting and intriguing visuals, this adventure feels flat... I blame Dash's direction of his voice cast... They talk in weary whispers or through gritted teeth, smudging every emotion into one note of drudgery. Sadly, this drags down all the bits that might be exciting, thrilling, or fun into a muck of tedium.

With its sex and violence ["Cryptozoo"] is most certainly not for children, although its Jurassic Park style themes concerning failed Utopias passed through the prism of Sixties politics and activism have a certain childlike simplicity to them and, as such, are likely to prove more endearing to some audiences than others.

Nothing about where the story is going or how it’ll get there stylistically can be taken for granted. That’s one of the biggest joys of Shaw’s projects — the sense of something new and different happening, of that anti-capitalist, anti-conformist, anti-containment bent that stretches throughout the story also extending into every aspect of the film’s aesthetics.

Shaw’s psychedelic, patently adult animated feature brings daydreams into the pointedly violent and bleak reality that its genre contemporaries are privy to ignore.

At times meandering and messy, Cryptozoo remains nonetheless a wondrous vision – itself a mythical creature in the context of cinema... Embedded in the hand-crafted language of Shaw’s film is a tale that echoes beyond the walls of the cryptozoo and into our own world.

[Shaw's] well of imagination is matched only by his precision at executing his ideas... “Cryptozoo” is a dazzling and provocative delight.

There is cult potential in each eye-popping frame of "Cryptozoo"... An animated feature aimed at teenagers and adults, there is nothing quite like it out there at present. You have to admire its storytelling energy and individuality and can only concur with hippy Matthew that it is a sweet trip.

When something like Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski’s "Cryptozoo" comes along, it’s easy to recognize as one of the most gorgeous works of American animation in ages.