Critic Reviews

To watch Cryptozoo is to open a Disneyland-size kingdom of ideas that never cease to astound.

When something like Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski’s Cryptozoo comes along, it’s easy to recognize as one of the most gorgeous works of American animation in ages.

When you turn on Cryptozoo, you’re in for something that’s unlike anything else you’ve seen before. It is the most interesting and singular animated movie I’ve seen in years.

Page by page, frame by frame, it seeks to cultivate your wonder and awaken your outrage, to spin a work of unbridled fantasy into a depressingly relevant critique of human callousness and greed in any era.

Brimming with constant new ideas and visual innovation, Shaw’s work captures the flurry of thought and motion at the center of dangerous times, and even dares to make them fun.

Animation director Jane Samborski’s richly eclectic miscellany of visual styles depict a bestiary of mythic creatures and outré scenes of sex and violence that are matched to director/writer Dash Shaw’s allegorical narrative.

Despite all the influences that have been brought to bear on Cryptozoo, it still very much feels like its own creature.

This time out, the writer-director (in collaboration with animation director Jane Samborski) is even more assured as both a storyteller and as a crafter of images, be they outrageous or gorgeous, haunting or hilarious.

In this zoo, the story may be tame, but the images, and the imagination that releases them, run wild.

Cryptozoo stands out as an aesthetically ambitious undertaking, seducing viewers with its hypnotizing hand-drawn animation and John Carroll Kirby’s pulsing electronic score.