Our ‘Cryptozoo’ review was first published after the film’s premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Treat yourself to a deep toke of your preferred strain of cannabis, and settle in for writer/director Dash Shaw’s animated film Cryptozoo, a counter-culture-minded fantasy-adventure about the existence of imaginary creatures. It also speaks on humans’ varying efforts of safeguarding and domesticating endangered species and understanding the “other” in the hopes of conceiving a utopian world.

With its child-like, trippy visuals, it’s easy to feel like you’re catching a contact high from just watching the film. It’s simply rendered; the flat, 2-D hand-drawn animation of pencil lines and blotty ink, along with its stop-motion fluidity, feels as if the doodles from the corner of a stoned high schooler’s notebook came to life in vivid wonder.

Cryptozoo doesn’t so much require an active effort to follow along with, story-wise, and instead opts to slow you down. Its glacially-moving pace feels like a nice drift into a lazy, spellbinding daydream.

You’ll first need to know what “cryptids” are, which the film explains as animals whose existence is unknown or doubted (which, if you’re unaware, are rooted in cultural folklore and mythology). Lauren Gray (Lake Bell) is an activist who frees cryptids from black market opportunists. When the US government sets its sights on capturing the Baku–a cryptid that can suck out dreams–for weaponizing its powers to “wipe out the dreams of the counter culture,” Lauren teams up with Medusa-humanoid Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia) to save the creature and their world (because “without dreams, there is no future”).

Cartoonish and yet beautifully textured, Dash Shaw (My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea) and Jane Samborski (Cryptozoo‘s animation director) pair wonderfully in bringing a balanced mix of limitless imagination. They also give millennial-minded reverence for counter-culture graphic art of the 60s, which extends to the idealism of the time that is at the heart of this film as well. They’re both earnestly-minded artists with pure-hearted love for these imaginary creatures, and it’s obvious that this film shouldn’t be written off as just a “trippy movie.”

Shaw explores our flawed human logic of the “Cryptozoo,” which Lauren calls a “sanctuary to preserve the animals” – but it’s as much that as it is a Seaworld-esque amusement park. The themes of domestication, preservation, exploitation, and control pop up as well. And it’s all staged against the evil, controlling US government, whose demonization is both infantile as it is accurate (swap out “cryptids” with indigenous people and it’s a story about our history of dominating other cultures).

Highly inventive and imaginative, Cryptozoo is a playful fantasy adventure with altruistic ideas of man’s relationship with the natural world and animal liberation. Dash Shaw proves that a child’s eye and mind is the best way to see magic and understand oppression and letting things be free. Take a trip to Cryptozoo and into a world that imagines how a more ideal way of life can be lived.