Lively, thoughtful crowd-pleaser

Rating: 8/10 (19 November 2013)

A Stone Age family of six, The Croods live in a world where life is a nonstop struggle for survival and where anything new is to be feared and avoided at all cost. Or at least that's what young Eep (Emma Stone) has been taught to believe by her well-meaning but over-protective dad, Grug (Nicholas Cage). But Eep is a naturally bright and curious sort, and when she meets a cute boy, Guy, (Ryan Reynolds) living out on his own who's discovered this new-fangled thing called "fire," she makes it her life's mission to start venturing out a bit more on her own. Guy also offers her a more optimistic view of life and the future than she gets from her scaredy-cat dad who prefers to huddle with his family in a tiny cave safe from the threats outside. But when an earthquake destroys the family's cave, they are all forced to hazard out into the big bad scary world of threats by nature and hungry prehistoric predators.
Written and directed by Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco, "The Croods" is lively and fun and built upon the theme of learning to face one's fears and of finding the courage to move on to bigger and better things in spite of the potential dangers lurking along one's path..
In addition to the amusing, nicely differentiated family members, there's the customary bevy of cute and cuddly prehistoric creatures (even the threatening ones are kind of cuddly) to make this a fine, non-threatening look at life in prehistoric times, fit even for the more impressionable kiddies.
The computer-generated animation is clean, if not exactly envelope-pushing or spectacular, and it makes up in speed what it lacks in sophistication.