No knuckle-dragging in caveman comedy 'Croods'

JUST AS the caveman comedy "The Croods" hits theaters, there is breaking Neanderthal news.

This just in: Scientists at the Natural History Museum now believe that our cousin the Neanderthal, whose brain was as big as ours, died out because too much of his brain was dedicated to vision and physical ability, and not enough to socialization and thinking.

Thus, he was unable to "cope with environmental change and competition."

This is, rather shockingly, the precise story line of the new 3-D animated comedy "The Croods," though with an upbeat spin. It's the story of a neanderthal-ish dad (Nicolas Cage) and a hotshot Homo sapien (Ryan Reynolds) who vie to lead a family of cave-dwellers away from environmental catastrophe.

In fact, co-directors Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders might have to revise their advice to kids who see "The Croods."

"We like to say, 'Please don't base your book report on what you see in our movie,' " said De Micco, a North Jersey native whose career as an animator in Hollywood includes "How to Train Your Dragon."

De Micco and Sanders certainly weren't thinking evolution when they designed the characters.

"The main thing was, we wanted the characters to be believable as people who could survive in a harsh and changing world. That was the thing," De Micco said. "Survivability."

So the characters had to be way tougher than modern humans.

"For instance," he said, "we wanted them to have the ability to survive a great fall, just beneath what a superhero would be capable of. More than Jason Bourne, but less than Batman."

The most important rule: no knuckle-dragging.

"You typically see [prehistoric characters] moving slowly, grunting, dragging their knuckles," Sanders said. "Our idea was, for these guys to survive at that time, they'd have to be as fast as NFL players, and as strong. We kind of wanted to do for cavemen what '28 Days Later' did for zombies."

Cage is the voice of Grug, who cautiously herds his family (Catherine Keener, Emma Stone, Betty White, Clark Duke) into a cave every night, and thus clashes with his adventurous daughter, voiced by Stone.

He loses his unchallenged authority when early man shows up, in the form of a guy named Guy (Ryan Reynolds).

"Guy comes into the picture and he's a different kind of man," Sanders said. "He's human 2.0. His brain is bigger, and he's a nomad. He's been places, seen things, he's got shells around his neck. These people have never been anywhere. Where they live is a cul de sac. Literally a dead end."

Guy leads the group on a journey to presumed safety, through prehistoric landscapes carved from the imaginations of DreamWorks animators, full of far-out fauna.

"Originally we were getting designs that were too dinosaur-like, too reptilian," Sanders said. "Then we had an animator come to us with the idea for a hybrid animal, formed from two different species. And that seemed like a good framework for us. If you rolled back history, you would see a creature before it split off into separate things. But the main idea was, make it unique."

At other times, they wanted details to be as specific as possible - for a scene of characters stuck in a tar pit, Sanders said, they had a three-hour meeting about tar.

"The color, the viscosity, the shininess - you have to work it all out," Sanders said.

They studied volcanic eruptions, so as to better animate a key sequence in the movie's finale.

"It's not lava that gets people. Lava moves too slow. It doesn't kill anybody. What kills people is the pyroclastic flow," Sanders said, referring to the high-speed rush of hot dust and gas that pours out like a rushing, billowing cloud.

"You die because you choke on this superheated cloud of gas that's also poisonous," Sanders said.

But not, one hastens to add, in "The Croods," which is PG, 3-D, and ends happily for all concerned.