Dash Shaw Talks ‘Cryptozoo,’ Animation Influences & Dream Politics [Sundance Interview]

It’s remarkably rare that anyone makes a hand-drawn animated feature for adults, let alone one as strikingly surreal and seriously minded as Dash Shaw’s “Cryptozoo.”

This Sundance premiere – honored with the fest’s Innovator Award in its NEXT section for “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling” – takes place in an alt-history 1960s secretly populated by “cryptids,” including fantastic beasts like the Kraken, the Loch Ness monster, and Sasquatch.

A globe-trotting adventure that illuminates government conspiracies, larger conflicts between counterculture and capitalism, and valuable life lessons about why you shouldn’t mess with unicorns, “Cryptozoo” unfolds in a hallucinatory kind of dream logic. Overseen by Jane Samborski (Shaw’s animation director, producer, and wife), its animation is both gorgeously vivid and astonishingly fluid, swirling together a panoply of styles, from watercolor to marker scratches, in order to minimize senses of boundary and rigidly defined form.

Take the extended prologue, in which two naked hippies (Michael Cera and Louisa Krause) get high in the woods and see the landscape twist and flow around them in vibrant color as they’re drawn toward a fenced-off area filled with unexpected dangers.

Within this hypnotically trippy vision, “Cryptozoo” foregrounds three women – intrepid cryptid hunter Lauren (Lake Bell, “In a World…”), aging zookeeper Joan (Grace Zabriskie, “Inland Empire”), and young gorgon Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia, “Dogtooth”) – as they endeavor to capture the rare dream-eating Japanese cryptid known as the baku. The U.S. government wants to weaponize the baku in order to erase the dreams of idealistic activists in the decade’s growing counterculture; carrying out that nefarious plot is Nick (Thomas Jay Ryan, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), the Belloq to Lauren’s Indiana Jones, and a villainous half-faun mercenary named Gustav (Peter Stormare, “Fargo”).

Shaw – a U.S-based comic-book artist and animator whose last feature was 2016’s “My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea” – spoke by phone about the process of making “Cryptozoo,” why it was important to ground his fantasies in reality, and how he literalizes imagination through animation. The film, recently acquired by Magnolia Pictures in its first sale of the festival, is expected to see release later this year.

I loved “Cryptozoo” and how fully it explores its world. I had such an affection for cryptids growing up, the mystery around them and how they factor in global mythologies. When did you first encounter them?
I played “Dungeons & Dragons” growing up. Jane, my wife, who is the animation director on “Cryptozoo,” had an all-women’s D&D group while I was living in Brooklyn. That inspired me to write something she’d enjoy participating in; she painted most of the cryptids. That also inspired having a mostly female cast in the film. Also, “The Last Unicorn” was an ‘80s film on heavy rotation for me; that actually has a cryptozoo in it!

At what point in putting together “Cryptozoo” did the idea of these creatures existing become about protecting them – about the idea that, if cryptids were real, they’d be under threat?
The initial motivation for that was that these beings represented imagination and the myths that are underneath our culture, informing our world. The idea of preserving cryptids is a built-in allegory, then, for our dreams. They’re not so much actual animals; the key point of them is that they’re imaginary. When Phoebe says, “We’re real too,” I’m thinking of a Picasso quote that was at the beginning of the script for a while: “Everything you can imagine is real.”

That quote was meaningful to me in terms of taking imagination seriously, approaching it with respect, as the base for how everything begins in the mind and is then brought forth into our reality. Preserving cryptids was part of that, as I made a network of characters all approaching cryptids in a different way. They all have a different love of them for different reasons, and then the movie is a collage spreading out from that.

I’m struck by this film being set in the 1960s and being grounded so directly within that decade’s struggle between the counterculture and capitalist bureaucracy. Especially given the melancholy vein of this film, when did you know “Cryptozoo” would be set then and have this end-of-innocence vibe?
Around the same time, Jane had her D&D group, I had a fellowship at the New York Public Library. One of the other fellows there was doing a project about counterculture newspapers of the ‘60s from all over the world. Part of those fellowships is you have access to incredible, unbelievable archives, and they had all these newspapers, from 1966 Brazil and 1967 Chicago.

What was cool as an artist to see was that this kind of art-nouveau, almost Winsor McCay line quality was present in all the papers. It was pre-Internet, so it was this moment where an aesthetic had somehow become globally attached to the counterculture in all these different places. There was a resurgence in Aubrey Beardsley art right before then, at museum shows, and people have tried to pinpoint exactly why that was. They had a certain hope and optimism that I think is present in the film; even with those newspapers, they’d have one-word titles like “Change.”

Seeing all those newspapers was inspiring, and those line qualities led me to McCay, whose unfinished film “The Centaurs” I saw around that time. Being a cartoonist, I also know far too much about Walt Disney, and since forever I’ve been fascinated by that point at which he died and his dream for EPCOT Center – which was going to be an actual city, where people would live – was transformed into just another amusement park. We see it under construction in “Cryptozoo.” These things aligned to equal my script.

Animation is often thought of as being family-friendly and fantastical in a way distanced from the real world. Your film pushes back on both of those presumptions; it’s bloody and violent but also features real history, down to Spaceship Earth being visible in the skyline of one scene. How did you decide how much real history to pull in?
Though “Cryptozoo” is a fantasy movie, it was important that it be obviously about our world, and that all the cryptids come from actual mythologies. I wanted people to think about how imagination is handled and hemmed in, not to dismiss that and to take it realistically. I know that sounds maybe silly. “Why even make it animated if your goal was to treat it with realism?” But all I make is animation. I don’t have any live-action aspirations.

There was a lot of discussion while making the film about whether to put an actual year in a title card at the beginning. I was always pushing against that, and it’s not in the movie, because I mostly watch older movies. The fun of them is that, as the details trickle in – through something a character says, the quality of the film, or what clothing people are wearing – you’re honing in on when it was made. Of course, they wouldn’t write a year at the start, because it was just made in its time. When “Cryptozoo” starts, there are hints about the date before it settles into 1967; but there are other characters in it who I associated more with the 1980s.

The bold, static compositions and Renaissance graphics I’ve seen compared to René Laloux and “Fantastic Planet,” but others have drawn comparisons to Ujicha, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington. How would you describe it?
I was mostly a comic-book artist, for many years. I always wanted to make animation, but it felt impossible. I thought I’d have to have millions of dollars, move to Los Angeles, and work my way up through an industry in hopes of one day being a director. Comics, though, you can do all by yourself, and that’s especially [true of] alternative comics. Often, alternative cartoonists don’t even have an agent; it’s still very connected to DIY culture, and it’s more accessible. I made comics, and the animation I always liked was really connected to comics.

I loved the “Speed Racer” animated series, based on a comic, and the early Osamu Tezuka cartoons, especially what he did with Mushi Productions. Tezuka was a fantastic artist, and his style of animation was called “limited animation,” essentially limiting the number of drawings you have in which to execute a cartoon. That mode – and others in that mode include the Charlie Brown Christmas special and “Belladonna of Sadness” – totally makes sense to me. I think it is beautiful and connected to independent cinema, doing a lot with a little in a way [like] Godard.

It felt like a mode I could contribute to in a meaningful way. It’s really my language. I just know the shots those modes favor. There’s a lot of planar movement in my cartoons, because it makes sense to have things move side-to-side when you’re drawing with a pencil on a piece of paper rather than to scale things forward and back. It becomes confusing to break down increasing or decreasing proportions.

“Cryptozoo” also features an impressive voice cast and an epic scope that feels made for the big screen. How did you translate limited animation styles into something cinematic?
I majored in cartooning at the School of Visual Arts in New York, but I worked at the library where I’d have to get film teachers their prints. There, I fell in love with independent cinema. Todd Haynes’ “Poison” was a huge movie for me, in that it has this collage-like look and genre elements.

That mode, even when I began with “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea,” involves picking a ratio, and I always pick the widest aspect ratio possible. Even though it’s drawn on 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper, with this thick pen, I was thinking of it as a film and trying to craft something that gave me that hour-and-a-half-long stream.

The voice performances also had to have a realism that would sustain that. So many TV cartoons with voice actors have this obnoxiously loud, screaming style where it feels like nothing is ever real. It’s all very broad. When I’m working with voice actors, I always tell them not to change their voice thinking I want a “cartoon-y” voice. I want the human element that’s shooting out of the artificial world of these drawings.

Tell me about the idea of the Baku. I find it so compelling, that idea these characters are fighting for possession of dreams.
That’s related to your question about it being cinematic. To me, the Baku and the idea of “dream-eating” felt like a great concept for a movie as opposed to a comic. Something about movies, the way in which they unfold in this abbreviated version of time and space, can create a dreamlike state. Everyone says that, but it’s true… I write down my dreams. I married Jane because I got a string of dreams about it. So, yeah, I take them seriously.

“Cryptozoo” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and has been acquired by Magnolia Pictures.

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