Attention Hollywood:  We get it, OK?  The fathers of teenagers, especially teenage girls, are backwards, violent, dull bullies.  They do not welcome change in the ways that things happen, but they will eventually have a change of heart when faced with no other choice.

Now that that’s said, let’s talk about “The Croods“, the latest animated feature from Dreamworks.

Plot Synopsis (Some Spoilers)

The Croods are a family of cave dwellers who live on the ragged edge of extinction.  They are isolated from other human populations because the others have died off.  In order to keep his family alive, Grug, the father, is rather neurotic about keeping everyone inside their cave as much as possible.  His teenage daughter, Eep, dreams of what exists beyond the limits of her father’s comfort zone.  One night, she spies something outside the door to the cave, and sneaks out.  She meets a wandering teenage boy named Guy.  After being caught by her dad, she is being dragged back to the cave when the world starts shaking around them.  A rockslide reveals a land of wonderful plants and creatures, which the family must cross in order to survive.  Grug makes the usual movie dad moves of being an overprotective, controlling dolt, but in the end shows that he can accept changes.  And they lived happily ever after.

The cast includes  Nicolas Cage (Grug), Emma Stone (Eep), and Ryan Reynolds (Guy).  The minor characters are played by Catherine Keener as Ugga, the mother, Chloris Leachman as Gran, the grandmother, and Clark Duke as Thunk, the moronic brother.  The other characters in the story are a baby sister named Sandy and a lemur/sloth/whatever named Belt that have no real lines, but add comic relief to the story.

All of the voice acting is done well and I could believe that those animated characters would speak with their assigned voices, with the exception of Grug.  Nicolas Cage used his natural voice for this character, and it just didn’t seem to fit very well.  The character is barrel chested and muscular, but Cage’s slightly whiny, higher pitched voice didn’t work for me.

The animation in this story is amazing.  There were points in the movie where I had to work hard to not believe that the settings were not actual footage from the real world with cartoons added.  The details of the characters and the animals they encounter were astonishing.  Dreamworks came right up to the edge of the uncanny valley on this one, but stayed just on the side of ‘cartoonish’ rather than’weird’.  The animals in the movie have a Dr. Seuss feel to them, but with a sharp, toothy edge, and are rendered in a detail that would have been impossible a few years ago.

The story itself, while having some novel twists to it, has been done so many times, including by Dreamworks, that it’s predictable.  The character of Grug is especially cliché.  He follows the archetype of the father characters in other movies such as How to Train Your Dragon, Hotel Transylvania, Brave, and The Goofy Movie – A lout who tries to keep his family safe to the point that it becomes comical and who scorns any ideas from younger, hipper characters.  I guess all that can be done in a family friendly movie has been done and overdone.

The pacing of the story was actually quite good.  While the “loutish father” schtick is played over and over, the plot moves along very well.  The movie comes in at 98 minutes, and I never felt like it was dragging or rushed.

Overall, I’d give the movie a B.  It’s worth a rental or a matinée, but not worth paying full price.  It’s also pretty much the only movie for young children in theaters at the moment, so expect a crowd at the cineplex.