Night of the Zoopocalypse is an engaging blend of silly and spooky that should delight and amuse the post-toddler/pre-teen crowd nicely. Based on a concept from revered horror writer Clive Barker (yes, the guy behind Hellraiser and Candyman), Night of the Zoopocalypse is a colourful, snappy, and creative animated adventure that delivers a good time that even adults will find most agreeable. With a release timed perfectly for March break, this is a nice way for families to shake off the winter blahs.
Life at the Culpepper Zoo rarely changes for the animals living there. Everyone keeps to their own packs or themselves. The park opens and fills with kids every day, and it always ends with an annoying jingle from the clocktower. Strong willed wolf Gracie (voiced by Gabbi Kosmidis) has some ideas about how her pack can break up the monotony of daily life and practice some new survival techniques, but her set-in-their-ways grandma (Carolyn Scott) won’t hear it, believing that all the other zoo animals are a danger to their way of life. One night, a mysterious meteor crashes into the zoo, carrying with it a strange infection of sorts that can turn animals into goopy, gummy mutants. Separated from her pack, Gracie forms an unlikely and always tenuous alliance with a grumpy mountain lion (David Harbour), an arrogant proboscis monkey (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee), a high strung ostrich (Scott Thompson), a classy capybara (Heather Loreto), a cinephile lemur (Pierre Simpson), and a precocious young pygmy hippo (Christina Nova) to survive the night and hopefully reverse the effects of the meteor.
A Canadian-French-Beligian co-production, Night of the Zoopocalypse is built on well tested templates from the world of both horror and family filmmaking. A bunch of misfits that don’t particularly like each other are the only survivors of a large scale catastrophe, and they have to work together as a team if they don’t want to turn into ornery gummy bears (or frogs, or antelopes, or bunnies, or you know, whatever animals are around). The characters complement each other nicely, and the exaggerated style of the animation keeps things amusing enough to offset some of the scarier beats that might fluster some of the younger audience members. It’s very clear that none of this is real, which is a nice touch for something on the scarier side aimed at kids. Given the target demographic for Night of the Zoopocalypse, the filmmakers have hit a sweet spot. It’s a cartoon, but in the best possible way, almost to a point where Night of the Zoopocalypse feels like a throwback to a time when indie animation studios would make solid fare from simple concepts on a more regular basis.
Veteran animation directors Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro make clever visual allusions to genre and pop culture staples like Stranger Things, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Alien, and most obviously The Thing, even employing a pastel and neon heavy colour scheme and a synth heavy musical score that bring favourable comparisons to John Carpenter. Writers Steven Hoban and James Key give the technical team plenty of ideas for hilarious set pieces involving atypical genre movie fodder (squeaky toys, stuffed animals, ball pits, snow globes). The voice cast adds to the charm by going the extra mile to make sure their work matches up to the visual appearance of their characters. It’s not a reinvention of anything – something the script’s smartly self-referential nature is keenly aware of – but all of it works.
Night of the Zoopocalypse is just pulse quickening enough to give younger viewers a bit of an adrenaline rush with a minimal chance for lasting nightmares. It’s also funny enough for adults to stay engaged and amused for ninety minutes. It’s a darkly tinted family film made with a considerable amount of love, care, and wit, and that, as they say, is sometimes all you need.
Night of the Zoopocalypse opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, March 7, 2025.
