![]() Lauren believes the Cryptozoo is a stepping stone toward integration. Her travels with Lauren prompt ideological exchanges about whether keeping cryptids in an amusement park replete with carnival rides and cute merchandise will diminish human fear and breed tolerance, or whether the best they can hope for is being gawked at like circus freaks. ![]() Phoebe is a humanoid gorgon who has to keep her snaky Medusa hair covered to avoid turning people to stone. When the baku goes missing, Joan sends Lauren to track the creature, assigning Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia) to help. ![]() It’s funded by wealthy philanthropist Joan (Grace Zabriskie), who lives in a tower on the grounds and nurtures a utopian vision of interspecies harmony: “If we show them love, then they will return love.” All of them are being collected in the sanctuary of the title, into which Matt and Amber stumbled while it was still under construction. She’s one of countless rare beasts drawn from multicultural folkloric origins. ![]() The baku is imagined as an orange pig-like creature with the trunk of a baby elephant and tendrils of blue fleece that float off into the air. Drawn like a strong-jawed Pre-Raphaelite Lara Croft, the adult Lauren now dedicates her life to rescuing these cryptids from black-market traders.īest Films From Sundance 2021: Hollywood Reporter Critics Pick 15 Favorites The protagonist, Lauren (Lake Bell), recalls her childhood as a military brat in Okinawa, where her nightmares were soothed by a baku, a Japanese supernatural being that sucks up dreams, allowing her to sleep. One of many lovely screen wipes and a dreamy cue in John Carroll Kirby’s shape-shifting electronic score segue to main title graphics that establish the film’s suspension between ancient mythology and spacey acid trip. “There is magic here,” whispers Matt, before tripping and freaking out the gentle creature, causing a double tragedy. Amber is wary of weapons labs, chemicals or test sites, but she follows anyway, just in time to share his awe at the sight of a unicorn in a glade that transforms the frame from monochromatic tones to full storybook color. Still buzzed and naked in the afterglow, they go exploring and find a massive fence, which Matt scrambles over, spotting a castle (“It’s like the home of Walt Disney!”). He has a dream (eyebrow-raising, given recent events) of thousands of people storming the Capitol to rebuild the perfect society where everyone is equal, while she observes with quiet foreboding that utopias never work out. The prologue has beardy hipster Matthew (voiced by Michael Cera) and geek-cool girlfriend Amber (Louisa Krause) getting stoned and having wild sex under the stars in the woods outside San Francisco in the late ’60s. Shaw also acknowledges the lineage of Japanimation cyberpunk favorite Akira and experimental French sci-fi Fantastic Planet, though the collage here of pencil drawings, wash paintings, traditional cel animation and computer articulated kinetic dreamscapes evokes everything from Yellow Submarine through vintage Ralph Bakshi to Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. Writer-director Shaw traces his inspiration to The Centaurs, an unfinished 1921 work by early American animation innovator Winsor McCay, as well as an all-women Dungeons & Dragons group run by his wife, Jane Samborski, who serves as animation director on this five-year project.
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