Two families, one valley, and a disagreement over who counts as civilised: The Croods: A New Age turns a neighbourly feud into prehistoric slapstick. Joel Crawford directs this 2020 American animated adventure, which runs 95 minutes and is aimed squarely at family audiences.
What is The Croods: A New Age about?
The Croods have put their cave behind them and are out in the open world, and nothing they have faced since walking away from it compares with what comes next. That threat is not a beast. It is another family, the Bettermans, who say they are better and more evolved and are only too pleased to prove it. Grug, head of the Crood clan, grows wary of the hosts, Phil and Hope, and he has reason to be. The Betterman parents are quietly scheming to pull his daughter Eep away from her loving boyfriend Guy, because they want a smart, protective partner for their own daughter, Dawn.
About the cast
The voice cast is unusually starry for a family cartoon: Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Peter Dinklage, Leslie Mann, Kelly Marie Tran, Catherine Keener and Clark Duke. With eight leads sharing the microphone, the film plays as an ensemble comedy, cutting between two households of parents and teenagers instead of following a single hero. Joel Crawford is the sole credited director.
Context & significance
Animated family films often set an old way of living against a new one, and this one does it through the most familiar of situations, meeting the neighbours. The Bettermans' very name states the joke, and the comedy comes from two sets of parents measuring themselves against each other while their children get on with their own lives. Beneath the chases sits a question parents will recognise: how to protect a daughter without deciding her future for her. Four genre labels are attached to the film, adventure, animation, comedy and family, and at a little over an hour and a half it is short enough for younger viewers to sit through. Reception has been generally favourable, the kind a dependable crowd-pleaser earns.
Watching The Croods: A New Age on Ktime
K-Time offers The Croods: A New Age with a Persian dub as well as Persian subtitles. The dubbed track is the practical choice for children who cannot yet read quickly, while the original voices remain available with subtitles. You can read this page without an account; to play the film, sign in to K-Time, a Farsi-language service made for Iranian families abroad.