Kirk DeMicco builds animated worlds with real care and then sends a story through them that we could have told you from the trailer. The creatures are his; the plots belong to everybody. For children under ten that is enough.
Fi1m perspective
Grug has one rule in The Croods (2013): anything new will kill you. Around him is a forest full of animals nobody has drawn before, and he will not look at any of them. That is Kirk DeMicco's cinema in one picture. He and his artists invent things with great patience, and then his characters say what families in cartoons have always said.
He was a writer before he was a director. There is a screenplay credit on Quest for Camelot (1998) and a story credit on Racing Stripes (2005), and the first film he wrote and directed himself, Space Chimps (2008), was received as formula and not much else. The Croods, made with Chris Sanders, was the turn. DeMicco said of it, "We’re going to make the first Dreamworks film about a family," and that is what it is: a father who would rather stay home, a daughter who wants out, and a road once the cave has gone. We gave it 60, and the verdict was easy. The places the family walk through are worth seeing and the things they say on the way are not.
Since then he has directed Vivo (2021), a musical with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a script shared with Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023), a mother-and-daughter story under a great deal of sea, which most critics found conventional for all its scale. He has story credits on The Croods: A New Age (2020) and on The Twits (2025). The pattern is hard to miss: a fear of change, a bond between generations, worked out beat by beat inside a world that deserved a stranger story.
We will own what happened to us in The Croods. For half an hour, from the moment the ground gives way, we were delighted by the forest and whatever was going to walk out of it next. Then we noticed we were waiting for the family to stop talking so we could look again. Sanders is the collaborator who has got the most out of him; the one film of DeMicco's we rate at all is the one he shared. The Twits is the warning. Dahl's book is short and spiteful, and the story credited to DeMicco gives the couple a town, a Mayor and two young heroes, which Phil Johnston and Meg Favreau then stretched to 99 minutes. The Twits survive it. Almost nothing built around them does, and we scored it 45.
He has spent his career making family films about families. We would like to see him make one about the animals.
Biography
Kirk DeMicco is an American screenwriter and film director. Born on 15 May 1969, he was raised in Wyckoff, New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1991 with degrees in economics and political science. After working as a journalist in Italy for three years, he joined the William Morris Agency before selling his first screenplay.
DeMicco is known for his work in animation. He wrote and directed Space Chimps (2008). With Chris Sanders, he co-wrote and co-directed The Croods (2013), which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature; he also contributed to the story for the sequel The Croods: A New Age (2020). His other credits include screenplay work on Vivo (2021) and direction of Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023). He co-wrote an early screenplay adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Twits with John Cleese.
