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A Magical, Mythical Tour Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski share the secrets of making Cryptozoo, their imaginative new feature about a fantastic beast sanctuary.
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f you like your animated features bold, hallucinogenic and packed with beautiful cryptids, then you are going to love Cryptozoo, the second feature by Dash Shaw and his wife Jane Samborski, who also gave us the highly original 2016 pic My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea. The new indie flick, which was made by the duo in their house in Richmond, Virginia with the aid of eight interns from a nearby college, is a beautiful, wildly imagined tale about a protected sanctuary for mythical creatures such as griffins, unicorns, manticores, chimeras and bakus (Japanese dream-eaters). Shaw and Samborski began thinking about the idea for this movie about six years ago, just as they were wrapping their last. “The storyline was the result of a few things coming together,” recalls Shaw during a recent Zoom interview. “I was thinking about how drawing is our first and only way to see imaginary beings, since they can’t be photographed,” he explains. [Animation pioneer] Winsor McCay had started an unfinished film called The Centaurs in 1921. Here is this great master of animation who had this idea of drawing as a way to see mythological creatures. His other work Gertie the Dinosaur and Little Nemo in Slumberland could also only be told through this medium.” Another inspiration was Samborski’s all-female Dungeons & Dragons group! “I wanted to
focus on something that Jane would enjoy since she ended up painting most of the cryptids in the movie, and that probably inspired the mostly female cast of the movie, and also the globetrotting nature of the project,” Shaw notes.
A Sixties Sensibility The filmmaker was also influenced by New York Public Library’s archives of newspapers from around the world chronicling the counterculture
movement from the 1980s. “I had a fellowship at the library, and one of the fellows was researching the movement, so I looked at the weekly papers from places like Brazil and Chicago, and noticed that they all featured this optimism and had this art nouveau, quasi-fantasy-type drawing style. That style was somehow attached to the global counter-culture movement in the days before the internet.” Shaw was also influenced by a New York Muse-
‘We wanted the movie to be a thrilling, experiential ride which feels like your imagination is running wild, almost in a dangerous way.’ — Writer-director Dash Shaw
www.animationmagazine.net 18 august 21
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