Top 100 Most Anticipated American Indie Films of 2018: #42. Dash Shaw’s Cryptozoo

Cryptozoo

Sadly, only one of the two films working with animation on our top 100, it was nice to begin the year with a profile on Dash Shaw, who delivered My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea in 2016. In that same year, he landed a San Francisco Film Society Screenwriting Fellowship, for continuing development of his script The Cryptozoo Debut, which has been updated simply as Cryptozoo. Electric Chinoland’s Kyle Martin, Jane Samborski and filmmaker Craig Zobel are producing. Let’s hope that the pot of coffee is always brewing in his household pushing helping slot his sophomore pick in 2018 release. Cast will surely be announced later on in the process.

A hand-drawn animated feature modeled after 1960s underground comic books about a zoo that houses mythological creatures. The zookeepers must catch these “cryptids” before they fall into the hands of arms dealers who want to sell them as weapons. As the zookeepers struggle to capture a Baku (a Japanese dream-eating creature) they begin to wonder if they should display these rare beasts, or whether they should allow them to stay hidden.

Release Date/Prediction: Always difficult to tell where an animated film might be in the process, but this could land at TIFF where My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea dropped.