Transfiguring Adoption’s Overview:
The target audience appears to be children age 9 and up. It also appears this movie would be best for most families with a caregiver nearby. While this movie does not directly address foster care it does address the feelings Guy has experienced as a child orphaned and trying to connect his past identity to his present. This is something foster and adoptive children may identify with while integrating experiences from a biological family and a found family.
** Spoilers Could Be Ahead **
How Is This Relevant To Adoption & Foster Care?
In this sequel to The Croods (2013), The focus shifts to the pack newcomer, Guy. Guy is introduced to this film with a backstory explaining how he came to find the Croods prior to the events of the first film. In this sequence we discover that Guy suffered intense trauma in watching his parents sink into tar (leading to their deaths) and having to navigate the world alone while searching for “Tomorrow”. While traveling with the Croods in the present the pack stumbles upon an oasis of sorts created by close friends of Guy’s family, the Bettermans. While Guy is excited to reunite with old friends and openness to innovations he realizes very quickly that his “Tomorrow” has changed since meeting the Croods (especially Eep) and that combining the past and present isn’t as easy as he expected with cultural differences and strong emotions involved. Foster and adoptive families can watch this movie to gain a better understanding of the internal struggle foster and adoptive children may be experiencing integrating all of their past and present together and children may relate to Guy’s struggle as well as Eep and the Crood’s struggles to fit in with the Bettermans.
Discussion Points:
- Cultural Diversity
Though the Croods and Bettermans are both human they have intense cultural differences in communication and how they live. This does not mean that one culture is better than the other, just that each family has learned unique ways to survive in the new age. In the same way, children that have come to your home from another household will also have lots of differences in how they may try to communicate with you and clash with some differences. Looking at the journey the Croods and Bettermans take in learning to appreciate the unique aspects of each family can be a wonderful example to caregiver and child alike as to how to blend a family and show appreciation for what different cultures can teach us. - Integrating Our Past and Present
While Guy appears to be a go-with-the-flow dude he has certainly endured some traumatic events prior to meeting the Croods. The start of the film gives the audience a brief summary of how Guy came to find the Croods complete with watching his parents sink into a deadly tar pit, being alone in the dark to navigate “tomorrow”, finding belt, and using creative inventions to help him survive. Though Guy now has spent a significant amount of time with the Croods, he still finds himself out of place due to his experiences growing up. Upon reuniting with the Bettermans, Guy significantly struggles with integrating his past with his present for a clear future with Eep. Children from the child welfare system often experience the same struggle. They have one foot in the identity of their family of origin or culture and another foot in their current circumstances of navigating their place in their new family, whether temporarily or permanently. Watching Guy’s struggle to pick and eventually bring together all parts of his identity to forge a future with Eep can be a wonderful depiction to help give a child vocabulary to express feelings of this nature and give hope to finding a “tomorrow” for themselves. - Emotional Scars Hit Deeper than Physical Scars
This point comes up while Eep and Dawn discuss scars as well as while Phil and Grug start slinging emotional punches in the ring surrounded by screaming Punch Monkeys. Throughout the film there is a consistent theme of how some scars are not so visible but can leave a lasting impact on someone. Like Eep, some children may wear some scars on their sleeve and be willing to share these experiences quickly. For kids like the Bettermans some may prefer to hide these scars behind passive aggression, snarkiness, and defiance. This is a great metaphor to talk to children about their own scars in a safe way as many children struggle to connect their feelings or experiences to behavior, especially if it happened a long time ago or before your child developed a visual memory.
Cautionary Points:
- A Lot of Violence
This film is about cavepersons so the weapons are more primitive, but there is still a lot of violence in this film. Most of the violence are used in slap-stick humor bits (i.e. – a repeated eye stabbing bit, siblings fighting and threatening groin shots, etc.) but there are intense sequences where the families battle monsters or creatures that mean them harm and several characters are in peril. While most children will laugh at these sequences or not be bothered children who have endured trauma from physical abuse or witnessing domestic violence may struggle with some of the more intense scenes. In addition to this, the Punch Monkeys’ language is based on violent acts like punching, kicking, biting, headbutting, etc. and this is made the be a funny joke. The characters show that they are visibly hurt by this communication style but caregivers should be aware as to prevent their children or youth from mimicking such bits with their peers. - Unrealistic Stunt Sequences Without Consequences
Though most of these stunts are done for comedic value there are several stunts involving riding/wrecking animals as if they are cars, jumping off of extreme heights, and other stunts that should not be mimicked by children or youth. Children or youth who have lacked supervision and care may attempt to mimic such stunts seeing that there are no long-term ramifications for the characters. - Censored Cursing
There are several sequences of characters cursing where either another character or nature (i.e. – geyser) may interrupt or censor the character cursing. These characters are all adults who engage in the censored language but children who have endured trauma may be better able to fill in the blanks than others and may attempt to mimic these scenes as well. - Characters Shown Under Influence of Substances
During the film Dawn is stung by a bee and in this universe these bee stings cause the characters to act as if they were drunk with slurred speech, inappropriate laughter, stumbling, and saying strange things. In the end credits this is brought up again during a banana party (complete with Grug doing a keg stand and the characters playing a sort of beer-pong game) while Dawn and her mom are shown laughing with stung hands as if they were stung on purpose for the drunkenness-effect. Though this will fly over many children’s heads, many children and youth who have endured trauma have witnessed such behavior in the past and this may trigger a response due to experiences of abuse and neglect involving substance abuse. - Flashbacks and Physical Scars
Guy experiences flashbacks of his parents dying in a tar pit and being orphaned, much like PTSD flashbacks often experienced by people who have endured loss or trauma. Eep also is shown bragging about physical scars (including a lost toe) while talking to Dawn about outside the wall. Emotional and physical scars could trigger children who have endured trauma due to their own scars, seen or unseen. - Survival Behaviors and Rulebreaking
There are several sequences where the Crood’s behavior does not fit in with the Betterman’s posh lifestyle and are reflective of behavior seen of children and youth who have endured trauma. This includes gorging/hoarding food, playing with toilets, fighting, Grug piling under furniture to mimic the sleep pile, defiance (in Eep’s encouragement that Dawn break rules), sneaking out/runaway, and overindulgence in high dopamine activities (i.e. – Thunk watching the “window” too much, ignoring Douglas). These are all reflective of survival behaviors that may have helped outside of the wall but, like a child who has endured trauma who has entered a foster or adoptive home, is maladaptive to bonding or adjusting to a new home. - Toilet and Partial Nudity Humor
Like many kids movies The Croods: A New Age (2020) is filled to the brim with toilet humor. Farting, playing with a literal toilet, a character mistaking an animal’s buttocks for fruit, and Sandy (the baby sister character) biting a monkey’s bright-red posterior are included in this film that may be repeated by a child who has not been taught that such behavior is not appropriate. There are also several sequences involving partial nudity. Phil and Grug are shown in their underwear, Gran brags about not wearing clothes “back in my day”, Gran announces that she “kicked death in the crotch”, and Gran is shown posing and in battle wearing what appears to be a battle bikini for a naked-grandma kind of gag. - Name-Calling, Manipulative Speech, and Verbal Altercations
This film has sequences of verbal escalations and conflicts that appear to cause physical harm at times. Several of these sequences show characters hitting with “low-blow” comments and insults. The Bettermans also use verbally manipulative tactics to meet their own desires without considering others. This is another area where children or youth may mimic phrases heard or the acts in general without a caregiver willing to talk through why name-calling and verbal altercations are not helpful for building positive relationships built on mutual respect. - Sequences with Elemental Danger
There are several scenes with volcanic explosions, characters being electrocuted, characters at risk of drowning or freezing, characters catching fire, characters being eaten by carnivorous plants, and animal attacks. These events are less likely to trigger a child unless they have a unique trauma experience with such elements (especially since so many of these are goofy and show little to no lasting harm to the character) but they may be problematic if a child has undisclosed trauma concerning such events and themes. - Animal-Specific Triggering
This may seem tedious to some caregivers, but many children and youth have intense phobias concerning monkeys and spiders (both of which are central to the last half of the film). The Punch Monkeys especially engage in a lot of scary behaviors such as attacking the characters, kidnapping the guys, trying to sacrifice the guys to a monster, and enslaving Guy in a scene reminiscent of Leia and Jabba from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983). The spiders shown are “Wolf Spiders” (literally) and are later found to be good guys who were defending a cub. Caregivers should be aware of this in case a child has such phobias as these are very common phobias that can be escalated by the traumatic/violent events that both types of animals are involved in this film. - Gran-related Antics that Didn’t Have a Category
Gran’s character is used for comic relief but had several pieces that were a little on the creepy or inappropriate side for younger kids. There are scenes of her creepily sleeping with her eyes open, her hair being a creature pretending to be a wig in a jump scare, Gran nihilistically telling Chunky (a Macawnivore) to eat her when the Croods think they’ve found the end of the world, and a weird scene in the title credits where Gran is back in the bikini with monkeys drunk on bananas while punching her abs. The most concerning to me were the drunken bikini punching bit and the suicidal request but across the board Gran was involved in a lot of unsafe behavior and showing an adult to be either incompetent or inappropriate as a caretaker (although a very cool warrior).
[Donate to this Project]
NOTE: Inclusion on these lists does not necessarily mean endorsement. Furthermore, with all our resources, we highly recommend you preview them first to determine if there are any trauma triggers that your child may not be ready to handle. Transfiguring Adoption does not intend for its reviewers nor its reviews to be professional, medical or legal advice. These reviews and discussion guides are intended to help parents to better be able to connect and understand their children who come from traumatic backgrounds.
