Just saw "The Croods" last night

[Bob Schroeck]

Don't ask me how I got my hands on a pre-release copy of the Blu-Ray disk, but yeah.  And I was wondering if anyone else who saw it felt that some of the animation looked so good that it felt like it had been actually filmed live?
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Dragonflight]

Sorry, never even heard of this one.
---
Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do.

[Bob Schroeck]

Ah. Dreamworks release from a few months ago, mostly the same team who created How To Train Your Dragon (except John Cleese was one of the writers of the original story before it went to screenplay). Family of cavemen (somewhat near-post-Neanderthal, voices including Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Christine Keeler and Cloris Leachman) join up with with a fellow who looks Cro-Magnon to escape an oncoming geologic catastrophe. The environment is beautifully rendered, and full of creatures that look like they ought to be in the fossil record but very definitely aren't.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[DHBirr]

Howard Tayler praised it highly back in the beginning of April:

The Croods was not what I
expected.  The trailers promised a
re-tread of the “Dad never lets me do anything” story, this time set in a
fanciful pre-history full of monsters that never made it into the fossil
record.  The film itself delivered
something different.  See, from the
trailers I expected the red-haired cavegirl to be our protagonist.  But a protagonist, at least in terms of
story structure, is a character who has a specific need or desire, a goal, and
has an arc, a path of personal change, after which they reach that goal, or get
to a point where they don’t need it, or maybe they simply fail (but I don’t like
that last sort of story much. 
Tragedy?  Yuck.)
Guess what?  The red-headed cave girl, Eep, is not our protagonist.  She gets what she needs — adventure outside
the cave — rather early in the movie, and is positioned for an entire life of
that, even if that life might be rather shorter than anybody would like.Her father Grug, however, has a strong arc.  He desires to feed and protect his
family.  It’s something he has at the
beginning of the film, and then his ability to deliver is taken from him.  Every strategy he has developed no longer
applies, and his brain simply isn’t built for coming up with new
strategies.  He descends deeper and
deeper into failure while everyone else seems to enjoy the adventure.

Spoiler (still from Howard's review):

There is a pivotal scene, and I do mean
pivotal, in which Grug can reach his goal. 
The one thing he’s good at — being physically strong — will let him save
the family, but only by throwing them across a chasm to safety while he remains
behind.  So he does.  He’s a good father, a good protector.

And then the movie follows HIM instead
of the family.

Pivotal.

Hey, as plot-twists go this is no Sixth
Sense reveal, but it really was wrenching. 
One moment you’re rooting for Eep and the others as Grug gets his
comeuppance for being dumb and unwilling to change, and then you realize that
Grug is the one we really care about. 

And a comment John Krupp attached to that review:

The only reason I didn’t cry, is I kept telling myself, “There HAS to be a
way.  This is too feel good of a movie
for him to die.”

Not only that, they didn’t take the first three easy ways I thought of to
save him.

 
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Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

[Bob Schroeck]

DHBirr wrote:

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And a comment John Krupp attached to that review:

The only reason I didn’t cry, is I kept telling myself, “There HAS to be a
way.  This is too feel good of a movie
for him to die.”
Not only that, they didn’t take the first three easy ways I thought of to
save him.

And best of all, it employs half a dozen Chekhov's Guns which you thought were just, well, things in the environment, and it happens in a way that explicitly echoes another character's description of moving forward into the future and destiny... "Just not very well."
When you discover that the original story, the one co-created by John Cleese, was originally going to be an odd-couple buddy flick between the two adult male leads (described as "an innovator and a luddite"), the "twist" doesn't seem like that much of a surprise.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.