Cryptozoo, arriving in theaters on August 20, is a visionary animated film from comic book writer Dash Shaw. Produced alongside his wife Jane Samborski, who also animated the extraordinary visuals of the piece, the story follows cryptozookeepers struggling to capture a legendary dream-eating creature called a Baku.
As the hallucinatory events unfold, the women of the zoo begin to question whether the mythical cryptids they cherish belong on display at all or if they should roam free - and better yet, unknown. Boasting the voice talents of Lake Bell (BoJack Horseman), Michael Cera (The LEGO Batman Movie), and Zoe Kazan (Clickbait), the film makes full use of the audience's senses to weave its magical tale.
Filmmaker Dash Shaw spoke to Screen Rant about drawing inspiration from the art of drawing itself, collaborating with his wife, and formatting his animation after figure sketching.
Screen Rant: What first inspired the idea of Cryptozoo, and what made you want to turn it into a film instead of a comic?
Dash Shaw: It was a few things at once. One was thinking about drawing as our only way of depicting imaginary, mythological beings. They can't be photographed.
I had seen this unfinished Winsor McCay short called The Centaurs - it's on YouTube, so I recommend watching it if you haven't. He did Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland and Gertie the Dinosaur, and I think all of his projects were doing things that other mediums can't, like depicting dreams or resurrecting dinosaurs. He had this idea to use drawing to depict mythological beings, and that short also has an adult quality and a kind of sexiness to it with these collages of forest environments.
Around the same time that I saw that my wife Jane had an all-women's D&D group. She painted most of the cryptids in the movie, so I think I wanted to write something that she would enjoy painting and figuring out. That also inspired the mostly female cast of the movie, although this only occurred to me later.
But about it being filmed instead, I loved those Little Nemo Sunday newspaper comics and originally thought, "It'd be cool to have each page be a different mythological being, and it could be a comic like that." Then, as I was researching different mythological beings, I came across the Baku. There's a Hokusai drawing of a Baku and an experimental manga anthology called Comic Baku, so I thought, "It's a movie idea."
Movies can be dreamlike when they're working well, and I hope that the movie feels like you saw a Hollywood movie and you fell asleep, then you woke up and had some weird fever dream version of a popular movie. So, I think the Baku takes the credit for trying to be a movie and comic.
I love that description. I think that is incredible. How much research did you do into the actual mythology of the cryptids, especially the Baku, versus focusing on certain adaptations of them?
Dash Shaw: Well, what's beautiful about these things is that they get adapted by different people throughout time. If you get into tarot cards, for example, there are certain key decks and you get to see all of these different people interpret the same cards - and that's what's fun and beautiful about it.
But Jane really dug into early representations of these mythological beings and then filtered it through her painting style. And as it related to the script, I read a lot. There's a Voorhees book that I had as a child that's all about mythological beings, so we read a lot like that. We tried to make sure that we were staying in our world and how these imaginary beings are in it, instead of having it be a new fantasy world that we were creating.
You mentioned collaborating with your wife Jane, whom I believe you also worked with on My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea. How has your process evolved, and how do you bounce ideas off each other or inspire each other?
Dash Shaw: It really got figured out on High School Sinking, because very early on I had the mission to try to make a limited animation movie. Jane was trained as an animator, and I was kind of roping her in on High School inking.
Then when it came time to do Cryptozoo, she really took over so many key parts of the movie and banished me from certain steps and levels of the movie. We share a "film by" credit in this movie because I feel like it's really a film by the both of us. Whereas for High School Sinking, I think she would agree I was trying to convince her to participate.
A lot of High School Sinking was like, "I have this idea. The characters are running through a hallway, and it'd be really cool if they were pencil drawings, and the lines could go like this." And Jane would be like, "Yeah, it'd be really cool if you took out the trash." But for Cryptozoo, she got into it more.
I was really fascinated by the voice performances. Lake Bell has such a distinctive and unique voice, as does Zoe Kazan. Overall, these actors are such interesting choices. How did you cast the film?
Dash Shaw: Yeah. This kind of relates to High School Sinking, because we had the majority of it drawn before we had a voice cast. I wrote that movie thinking that I wouldn't get any good actors, really. But we got great actors, and when that happened, Jane then was like, "Oh, wow." She didn't know it was going to be a serious thing.
When it came time to do Cryptozoo, I promised I wouldn't design the characters until after they had been cast. So much of this movie is how Lauren looks in this kind of pre-Raphaelite way. And that came from Lake Bell; if it was a different actor, that character would have had a different look.
Lake had done a whole movie about voice performing, [called In a World...]. It was the first movie that she wrote and directed, and that seemed super cool to me. Actors are so different from each other, but sometimes you get the feeling that voice acting is maybe a side gig, not not a mission [in] itself. So, I thought it was awesome that it was clearly part of Lake's mission, and she had thought a lot about voices - especially female voices. She's definitely a lead voice, and it's important to her, so she came to it with some extra conviction.
I could kind of blab about all of them. Michael Cera, for that role, has to have a naivete to him and a genuine innocence that can be endearing, but also worth critiquing. And I don't know how much people even recognize that it's him, because the drawings of that character ended up so different than what Michael Cera looks like.
The Baku is the focal cryptid if you will, but there are so many beautiful and mysterious designs throughout the film. Were there any others that stood out to you the most in the process of designing?
Dash Shaw: Probably Pliny. I had seen many Blemmyes - there's even a Blemmy in a René Laloux movie called Gandahar, so we spent a lot of time trying to figure out that character and that character's voice. We have that scene where they go and buy this child, and that was interesting.
The cryptids are mostly painted by Jane, and then you have these humanoid cryptids that have elements that I've drawn combined with Jane's painting. There is a kind of blurring of the lines there, which I hope is interesting. We also had painted beings that were obviously of our world, like a moth or like an insect in the frame.
The goal is that we have these beings around us that are operating on a completely different consciousness than us, and we can't comprehend it. But they're in our world, regardless. Also, I liked figuring out Phoebe and the blankness of her; figuring out some of the humanoid cryptids was really interesting.
I read that you video recorded many of the voice performances, and that's really interesting to me. I think it goes back to what you mentioned about catering more towards the actor when you're making that character design. What was that process like?
Dash Shaw: With Louisa [Krause] and Michael, we video-recorded them. It's not like Rotoscoping, but it's more like figure drawing class. Like, that guy doesn't look like Michael Cera, but he holds his arm in a particular way when he's approaching the unicorn. That, to me, is Michael Cera, I see him shooting through. Grace Zabriskie is another one where, if you have seen her in other movies, it's really fun to see how Grace is just shooting out of this drawing.
Honestly, I just thought it'd be super cool to see an animated movie where the drawings are more like figure drawing - meaning that, if you draw someone for half an hour in five-minute poses, they look a little different at each angle depending on the lighting. It's that Picasso thing of the human condition: all of these different personalities existing inside of this one being.
If I could have some of that feeling in an animated movie, instead of it being on [the] model and always the same..? If I could get some of that figure drawing spirit in it, I thought that alone would be worth doing.
You mentioned being inspired by Jane's Dungeons & Dragons club, and we really do see several women in this story each connecting in different ways to the plight of cryptids. What is your approach to writing those characters and tying them together in the film?
Dash Shaw: When I had the idea for Cryptozoo, the main idea was to have three different characters all approaching mythological beings from different angles - one being a cryptid herself, one mothering them in a weird way, and one being connected from their childhood.
Once I had that network, I thought the center of the movie would be that conversation they can have with each other about whether or not the cryptozoo is a good idea. But it felt like I couldn't enter the movie through them. It would be like starting with Lara Croft or something. We needed people like us that stumble across the cryptozoo, so that's when I created the bookend of the hippies. That was the nitty-gritty writing process of the movie.
I don't know if it really answers your questions, but there's a comic book quality to the characters in the movie that is effective to me. As someone who makes comics, I feel like books are very internal. In a good book, like Swann's Way or something, you're inside their mind. That's the book experience, but to me a movie experience is more external surfaces. It's an hour and a half, so it's not reduced but it's refined and abbreviated information.
But something that is cool about making animated movies is that you get the first recordings of the people together, but then do you do pick-up voice recordings with people separately. And that's often when you have a chunk of the movie done, and you're sorting it out. But either way, you end up having to write a script from the character's perspective. Because they're in this room, and sometimes the paintings aren't even drawn, so they don't know what's going on. You make a separate document for each of the characters, and I think that is a good writing exercise, even for a live-action movie.
Even for someone like Emily Davis, who voiced Pliny, we had a Pliny version of the movie. She knew where the character came from, and it really helps.
Finally, what's next for you and Jane?
Dash Shaw: I have an animatic for another one that I really want to make. And I'd love to just keep doing it.
Cryptozoo will be released by Magnolia Pictures on August 20.
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