Dash Shaw’s animated feature Cryptozoo begins in a psychedelic haze, evoking the mindsets of a Vietnam-era hippie couple roaming a forest at night. The frame is mostly black, with the couple and the occasional element, such as trees and a fluttering moth, illuminated in pastel hues. The man (Michael Cera) blisses out on acid and their lovemaking, seeing the shapes of constellations form in the sky above and fantasizing about a people’s overthrow of their government and police state. More pragmatic, his girlfriend (Louisa Krause) deadpans, “I’m less concerned about the ‘pigs’ than the wolves,” just in time for a colossal fence to materialize out of the darkness. Behind it lies fantastical creatures that are as beautiful as they are deadly, abruptly moving the film, Shaw’s follow-up to 2016’s My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, from reverie to nightmare.
After this wily opening, Shaw’s film introduces its protagonist, Lauren Gray (Lake Bell), who has devoted her life to protecting mythic cryptids from exploitation by various military and private entities. The throwback psychedelia of the film’s opening, with its heavy use of superimpositions and sharp color contrasts, gives way to a children’s storybook style, with bright colors and almost no interplay between foreground and background elements.
The characters creep along in choppy fashion, suggesting paper cut-outs brought to life through stop motion. This jerky movement contributes to the surrealistic nature of Cryptozoo’s Medusa-like women, chimeras, and other creatures living among the normal world, while the use of bright watercolor pastel colors brings a pastoral serenity to moments of idleness, such as the exterior of a small-town nightclub bathed in a dark purple hue.
The thematic heart of the story emerges when it’s revealed that Lauren, in attempting to outpace the capture of cryptids by profiteers, has crafted a refuge no less capitalistically inclined. The “Cryptozoo” of the film’s title refers to an amusement park that she’s constructed as a means of introducing the human public to cryptids in an attempt to normalize them. The irony of her enterprise isn’t lost on Lauren or those she brings to live in the zoo, and even as she takes a prospective resident on a tour of the facility she blithely and reflexively defends her project: “We need to be tourist-friendly. It doesn’t change our mission.”
Cryptozoo sets up this irreconcilable moral conundrum, of seeking to protect cryptids while profiting off of them, only to abandon it in favor of a final act that adopts the tenor of an apocalyptic action film as military forces descend upon the park to seize its denizens. It’s a frustratingly simplistic arc for what could have been a more incisive commentary on the greed that often undergirds ostensibly noble endeavors of world improvement.
Nonetheless, Shaw’s rendering of a world caught between the quotidian and the impossible, to say nothing of his interspecies erotica, is consistently striking, placing Cryptozoo in a clear lineage with the new weird literary genre that emerged in the 1990s, especially the work of China Miéville. Shaw’s deceptively simple animation regularly descends into phantasmagoria that delivers on his story’s strange premise more than the overriding narrative, giving the film a consistency on the level of emotion and atmosphere that its thematic development lacks.
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