August 18th, 2021 
Jackson Murphy 
Writer-director Dash Shaw and animation director Jane Samborski (a real-life couple who previously collaborated on 2016’s My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea) present the new adult animated feature Cryptozoo. Its distinct story and plethora of animation styles make for a one of a kind experience. Magnolia Pictures acquired the distribution rights following the film’s Sundance premiere in January, where it also won a special award. Cryptozoo opens in select theaters and is available for at-home viewing this Friday August 20th. Shaw and Samborski joined me over Zoom to discuss this ambitious movie. (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: Wow. It is a ride! It is fun!
Dash Shaw: We wanted it to be a ride for sure.
JM: Dash, I wanna know about the origins of this movie… and why you chose to set it in the time period that you do [the late ’60s].
DS: As your animation audience will know, there’s this great unfinished Winsor McCay short film from the 1920s called The Centaurs, and I feel like all of Winsor McCay’s projects, whether it be Little Nemo in Slumberland or Gertie and the Dinosaur are about using things that only drawing can do. Depicting dreams, resurrecting dinosaurs. Here: drawing is our first and only way of seeing mythological beings. They can’t be photographed. That short has a great adult, sexy quality where it’s half-nude centaurs in the woods.
Around the same time that I saw that short, I had a fellowship at the New York Public Library and one of the other fellows there was researching counter cultural newspapers of the 1960s. A lot of those papers have a kind of Winsor McCay-esque, thin line drawing style. That was really cool as a cartoonist because it’s one of the few times where a way of making lines was connected to a real ideology across the globe. [There was] a 1967 free weekly paper from Brazil and the same week in Chicago and they all had this utopian optimism in them. That inspired the timeframe, and Jane also had an all-women’s “Dungeons & Dragons” group around the same time. So Jane painted most of the cryptids in the movie. The creative process… usually for me is unexpected connections between a few different things and it creates a third thing.
Jane Samborski: Another thing I think was near and dear to Dash’s heart that happened at that moment in time is when EPCOT Center was being built, which was originally envisioned as a utopian city in which people would live. And then Walt Disney passed away and it was transitioned into an amusement park. Dash has loved amusement parks since he was a boy. His art that his parents kept are elaborate theme park maps. That was another tie-in to that moment and also to the themes present in the film.
Jane and Dash
JM: And Jane, what excited you the most as you read over the script… about the animation possibilities that you could do for this film?
JS: One of the first visual decisions that we made as we were writing the script was that we wanted fewer drawings, more specific drawings, and we wanted to be able to reuse drawings. From a practical point of view, we were transitioning from something that was closer to cel animation to something that was closer to puppet animation, which has been dear to my heart before I even knew that’s what I was attached to in so many pieces and media. I was super excited about that from a technical standpoint. It was a kind of terrifying amount of work to figure out how to make all these different pieces. It was a HUGE project. How to make the project work was exciting for me.
JM: And figuring out who’s going to do what. In the end credits, you list who animated exactly what sequence and [specific] backgrounds and sequences, which is smart. What was that organization and delegation process like?
JS: We are so lucky to be working with these people but that doesn’t come across necessarily in the way we did that.
DS: The way we credited it.
JS: Dash and I are doing most of the drawing, and I’m doing most of the animating, along with Emily Wolver. Because we brought in kind of “guest stars” for these very specific things, we wanted to credit them that way to say “This is the piece of the movie that I contributed.”
DS: Instead of it just being a list. It’s often a background. One person did a background painting so they’re listed.
JS: And we both felt that our names were in the credits enough so we didn’t need to get in the way of their moment to shine. Dash is an amazing director… he not only tasks actors to play parts, he’s casting artists to do a background and a creature and a visual addition to give us something to riff off of. So much of the film is this wonderful friction between Dash’s aesthetic and my aesthetic and figuring out how to make those two disparate things work. And then every so often we get this incredible injection of fresh air from our guest stars.
JM: Well it’s nice that you credit them how you do. You two tackling this whole thing is an incredible accomplishment, without question. And Dash, I like in terms of the story, how you start off with an opening section and then we get a completely different story and then you bring it all together in that third act. Did you know right away that you wanted to structure it that way?
DS: Yeah. When I was writing it, the centerpiece, which is kind of the center of the movie, are those three: Joan, Lauren and Phoebe and how they all have a different reason why they think the Cryptozoo is a good idea. The conversation about the Cryptozoo could be the meat of the movie. But I felt like I couldn’t enter through one of those characters then. If you started with Lauren, it would be like starting with Tomb Raider.
JS: It would frame her too much as the hero, which is not exactly what she is.
DS: Yeah and I just didn’t think you could enter that way, so we enter through two people who are more like us, who are stumbling across the Cryptozoo who don’t know anything about it. And then I wanted it to be a long enough stretch in that middle where it would be genuinely surprising that we come back to them.
JM: It is a surprise when we hit that moment. It really works. And you mentioned all these characters talking about the Cryptozoo itself and having their opinions on it. Is it for good? Is it exploitation? After years of you two working on this movie, what are your personal opinions about the Cryptozoo itself?
DS: The movie’s kind of like Jurassic Park in that you know it’s gonna fail at the beginning. So you’re seeing how it fails. So… the story I wanted to tell was that story. Obviously when you’re in the middle of the movie, it has enough associations with blockbuster movies where you can kind of imagine a Hollywood version of this movie that would be different. They might have a version of the movie that [shows it] fails too, like Jurassic Park, but there’s also probably a version of the movie where it’s a really good idea and it’s kind of structured that way. The failure of the movie and pairing that in the timeframe that it is was built into the motivation of the movie.
JS: If these problems had easy answers, we would’ve found them. What the movie is trying to do is say, “Human beings often have the best intentions at heart but we need to be constantly asking if we need to course correct.” If there’s a takeaway from the film, it’s to root for idealism. Question the path.
JM: I love the Baku as well and the power of dreams. What makes you think about dreams in such a powerful way – and [how did you] incorporate that into this movie?
DS: I’m someone who always writes down my dreams and enjoys listening to other people’s dreams.
JS: I can lucid dream. I can be in a dream and direct it, which is a wonderfully powerful, liberating experience that makes me wanna stay in that space. But on the end of the spectrum, I have some mental health issues and I have suffered from nightmares for most of my adult life. When I do the bulk of my creative process – when I hit a wall – Dash likes to take showers. I like to go to bed and close my eyes and kind of exist in that in-between space. I feel like that’s a mental space that [helps me] get past mental blockages. But nothing is universally good or universally bad. It can be dangerous. Nightmares can happen.
JM: Animated movies take four to five years, usually, as most people know these days. As I saw in the credits, this was drawn in Virginia from 2016-2020. So how were you able to have something so vibrant and unique and visually striking as this stay with you – and have that energy inside you – for all four or five years of making this?
JS: There’s some self-delusion involved. For me, it’s very much about zooming in on the project… and kind of putting blinders on and not worrying about the parts of the project that I’m not focused on right now. In most large animation productions, you’re planning out all the look stuff in advance to keep a huge team focused and on brand. We really didn’t do that. We wanted that authentic-ness in the moment and because we had such a small team and because so much of it was about pulling things that didn’t immediately work together into a cohesive whole, there was constant invention to be done.
Each scene was an individual after effects composition that was worked on independently of the rest of the film, which allowed us to almost treat each one as its own self-contained short film. They each had their own kind of aesthetic. We wanted to make sure they had ebbs and flows across those aesthetics but that each one contained exciting ideas. Because the project was so long, we would work on a thing to the point of exhaustion and then be able to step away from it for months and come back and see things with fresh eyes and take that one thing off or add that one thing. Rather than being a slog, it really ended up to our advantage.
JM: I feel that, especially lately, you think of an idea or do something or you have to make a decision and then stepping back and coming back to something after a little bit of thought is really, really helpful. So I’m glad you two had the opportunity to do that. One of the big things that has come out of this movie was the virtual premiere at Sundance and Dash, you winning the NEXT Innovator Award. How was it receiving that honor? That’s huge for your career.
DS: It’s totally great. Yeah.
JS: We were talking about the possibility of that. We drove down to Atlanta so that we could see…
DS: I don’t remember talking about the possibility of that.
JS: I remember talking about it! We also were looking at the judges and were like, “They look really cool and hip and fashiony. Maybe they’ll like it. Fingers crossed.” It’s hard to win an international award.
DS: Why is it hard, Jane?
JS: There’s a disconnect when you win something like that because you’re recognized on this international stage but you remain the same human being you were 20 seconds before you won the award. So there’s a little bit of that wrestling. But the other thing is I really feel like we innovated. It’s called an Innovator Award and we invented this pipeline. We figured it out from scratch. We built this thing. I’m like, “Oh my God! Do I deserve an international award?! Maybe. I hope I do!” Am I embarrassing you, Dash? I’m sorry. It’s strange. We’ll say that. It’s wonderful and strange.
JM: And well deserved. You did do a lot of innovation with this movie and animation in general. You two should be proud of this honor. And you’re doing something not just for animation but for more adult and abstract animation. After doing this movie and My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, what value do you two see in more adult, abstract animated content?
DS: In High School Sinking, I was roping Jane into it and I kind of thought it needed to exist in like a PG/PG-13-y space – if we were gonna spend years working on this thing. But then when High School Sinking came out, it just played the Metrograph theater and prestigious film festivals and the audience was mostly adults. When I saw that, I was like, “Oh. Great.”
JS: That’s what you wanted anyway.
DS: My graphic novels are mostly for adults. That was reassuring and allowed us to lean into things that we were maybe more interested in.
JS: This is genuinely the project we wanna be making – telling the story we wanna tell in the way we wanna tell it. We feel unbelievably lucky to be able to do that.
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