Alley Oops: “The Croods” (2013)

           For an example of what is despairingly wrong with modern animation features, one needs look no further than “The Croods”, an example of what appears to be the new industry penchant for “animation release of the week”,  with all of the apparent thought put behind the project that such accelerated production schedules might indicate. The film begins promisingly with a whimsical family history told through animated cave paintings, but the magic is quickly extinguished with the look of three-dimensional plasticity that has become de rigueur for all contemporary studio feature animation and an opening sequence which flaunts one of the curses of the cinema’s reliance of computer imagery, either live-action or in animation: busy action which defies the laws of gravity and general physics to the point of making Wile E. Coyote’s antics seem like a demonstration of quantum mechanics. (All this and the intrusive visual references to football- or is it rugby? -while the entire sequence is scored using Lindsay Buckingham’s Tusk, a bizarre example of anachronistic overkill that would make Fred Flintstone wince with embarrassment.

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