★★

To try and describe Dash Shaw’s animated free-for-all, Cryptozoo, might be next to impossible. As a follow up to his 2017 film, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, Shaw’s somewhat crude, mixed-media animation style is definitely not for everyone, and needs a strong, cogent story to keep viewers engaged.

The gonzo nature of Cryptozoo is simply far too unwieldy to sustain itself, even with a strong voiceover cast ready, willing, and able to tackle whatever Shaw throws their way.

The film begins with a couple’s carnal tryst, outdoors, in the dead of night, leading them to eventually encounter a massive wall. Their naked traversing of the wall leads them to finding a unicorn on the other side, which the man, Matthew (Michael Cera), agitates resulting in violence. This leaves his partner Amber (Louisa Krause) unable to get back across the wall. And so, in post-coital nakedness, she is left to reside with a zoo full of cryptids - animals rumored to be alive, but who have never been proven to actually exist. 

Along the way, we meet Lauren Gray (Lake Bell), an activist who seeks to free cryptids from all over the world. She holds a special affinity for them, as one creature - a baku - would visit her throughout her childhood and take away all of her nightmares. 

A philanthropist named Joan (Grace Zabriskie) embraces interspecies relationships and becomes involved as a full-out war between the United States military and an array of creatures and beasts breaks out. The results are often bloody, the storytelling chaotic, the plot careening wildly within structures which shift repeatedly. The film dazzles for a while, until everything just becomes far, far too much to take in. 

Humor appears too infrequently, the film struggles to connect its far-ranging, almost hallucinogenic thoughts. And though there is clearly an ambition and savant-like discipline to convey what is in the mind of Shaw’s limitless imagination, Cryptozoo simply never lands with a consistency deserving of the effort to piece all of this pandemonium together. 

Cryptozoo will perhaps find a passionate fanbase, but for a film that feels more like a late-night “Adult Swim” fever dream, this left me cold, disconnected, and unable to care all that much about any of the messages, themes, or ideas Shaw was putting before me. 

Cryptozoo was screened as part of the Fourth Annual North Bend Film Festival