★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro
Written by James Kee, Steven Hoban, and Clive Barker
Night of the Zoopocalypse is a zany, goopy gateway horror film inspired by a Clive Barker graphic novel. A meteorite crashes into the Culpepper Zoo and infects the animals trapped inside, turning them into gelatinous mutant monsters. A wily wolf and a cantankerous mountain lion team up to try to save their zoo, with the help of a wacky assortment of untainted zoo-mates. This is a simple story, but it is a fine introduction to light horror for kids who want something a little gross and a little spooky.
Creating a kid-friendly, actually scary animated movie that doesn’t cross over the line for young kids is a tricky proposition. Night of the Zoopocalypse walks that tightrope skillfully. It’s full of silly characters that kids will love, and ravenous goopy monsters that are grotesque and lightly horrifying. The animation is smooth, if not flashy. It’s a fairly conventional animated style, but it does lack the panache of a Pixar film. However, given its much smaller budget, this little Canadian animated feature uses traditional horror visual cues to establish the right mood without the fine details of the mega-budget animated productions.
The Voice Cast of Night of the Zoopocalypse
- Gabby Kosmidis voices Gracie, a young timber wolf who feels constrained in her role in the wolf pen. What good are chase games if life in the zoo offers no threats?
- David Harbour voices Dan, a recently captured mountain lion recently brought to the zoo, who seeks a way back into the wild.
- Paul Sun-Hyung Lee voices Felix, an arrogant proboscis monkey survivor who believes, as a primate, he is superior to the other surviving zoo animals.
- Scott Thompson voices Ash, an awkward and sarcastic ostrich who is the most skeptical of the various survival strategies. He and Felix don’t get along.
- Pierre Simpson voices the cinephile lemur Xavier, whose fanciful ideas come from his love of the movies. Sometimes his ideas aren’t half bad.
- Heather Loreto voices Frida, a sassy and practical capybara with little patience for her fellow zoo animals.
- Christina Nova voices the oblivious Poot, an infant pygmy hippopotamus. She is adorable but completely naive about the catastrophe around her.
A Synopsis of Night of the Zoopocalypse:
At the Colepepper Zoo in Vancouver, BC, Gracie and her pack siblings race through their exhibit, training for what Gracie’s grandmother suggests will be essential when the inevitable great reckoning arrives. Gracie scoffs at that notion. They live in a zoo, where all the animals are kept apart. Why worry? Perhaps the new mountain lion that has the rest of the zoo nervous is a threat. No worries, he’ll be in his own pen and won’t be a problem.
Later that night, however, a little meteorite punches through the night sky. It busts through several exhibits, finally coming to rest in the Kuddle Korner petting zoo barn. The meteorite awakens a bunny, who wanders over and swallows the meteorite. The meteorite transforms this bunny into gummy Bunny Zero. As Bunny Zero begins to assimilate the other erstwhile gentle animals in the barn, Gracie, freed from her exhibit when the meteorite punched through it, wanders in to investigate the commotion.
Gracie narrowly escapes Bunny Zero and finds shelter in the veterinary clinic. There, Gracie meets several other animals that have gathered inside for shelter. Felix, Ash, Xavier, and Frida manage to barricade the clinic… but Dan, the mountain lion, is also in the clinic, spending quarantine in a kennel. After much debate and power struggles, the group decides to release Dan and find a way out of the zoo. The alien gum-beasts have overwhelmed the zoo and broken into the veterinary clinic.
The group divides, with Gracie convincing Dan to join her in rescuing her packmates from her den. Along the way, they encounter the bubbly Poot pretending to be a shark in an amusement park ball pit. The remaining animals take refuge in the gift shop, where they have lifted a security key that might be their ticket out. Unfortunately, they can’t agree on any kind of a plan to get out.
The monsters outside are converging, forming an ever-growing menace. Is this going to be the demise of the Colepepper Zoo? It’s a PG movie, but we all remember what happened to Bambi’s mom, and that was rated G.
Evaluation of Night of the Zoopocalypse
Night of the Zoopocalypse entertains. Most of the jokes are a little immature, but such is the audience. The story brushes the characters in broad strokes. They are a zany lot, and some of them will certainly resonate with the kiddos. This feels like a movie where all the animal sidekicks of better movies come together to form a team and face down the mutants. Gracie is an adequate lead protagonist, but her half-nervous, half-confident depiction leaves her often in neutral. Dan is a big, blustering big guy with a heart of gold, but that’s about it. Poot is decidedly a blast, however, and steals every scene she is in.
Director Ricardo Curtis was an animator for The Iron Giant, one of the great underappreciated animated films of all time. His expertise here really helps. He knows how to manipulate the scale and proportions to accentuate peril and dread. The animations and renderings are clean and smooth, but many details are obscured by fog effects. That’s an old-school horror trick dating back to the Universal Monster movies of the Golden Age. Consider The Wolf Man. The images never get muddy, though, and the palette is Dario Argento-ready. Bright magentas and luminous blues. This is pretty, if a bit under-rendered by modern animated conventions.
The story follows a fairly conventional path. Your average zombie or alien-invasion film would be a fairly good comp. For knowledgeable horror fans, you will be able to spot plenty of homages to The Thing. There is a clear reference to the Norris transformation and the Head Crab. The body-snatching infection trope also harkens back to the Carpenter classic. However, what could have been a gory body-horror showcase becomes silly when the creatures turn into candy-like abstractions.
Concluding Thoughts
If you have kids, this is would be a great gateway horror film. It is suitable for younger children and does not bog down with contemporary references meant to please adults. It is also thankfully devoid of trying to be too cool and hip to current teenage trends. (Think Hotel Transylvania) Instead, it focuses on taking classic horror movie tropes and making them gentle enough for kids to handle. That restraint, though, makes it into a fairly straightforward film.
You may end up having to watch this over and over, as is the nature of kids’ animated films. I don’t think you would get tired of this one. At least, for the first fifty viewings. (Good luck, parents!) I say this because it is one of the rare authentically mildly scary movies appropriate for kids under ten. That’s really rare. It’s rated PG, and appropriately so. Remarkably, for a movie based on Clive Barker’s short story “ZOOmbies,” this is fairly tame material. No cenobites here.
For adults who are animation fans, this is fairly light fare. I enjoyed it. It’s not Miyazaki-level good or capable of making you cry like a Pixar film, but I would put this up against any non-Pixar feature out there. It’s rare that a small indie Canadian studio can produce an animated feature that feels this assured in its purpose.
Review by Eric Li
