Your child­hood night­mares lie in wait in The Dark Crys­tal: Age of Resistance

With every pass­ing year, the divid­ing lines between ani­ma­tion and live-action break down a lit­tle bit more. Who’s to say what’s a car­toon and what isn’t, when we’ve got pre-viz cin­e­ma from the MCU sit­u­at­ing real char­ac­ters in invent­ed envi­ron­ments and the pho­to­re­al­is­tic Dis­ney remakes plop­ping com­put­er­ized images in our real world?

To fur­ther com­pli­cate the debate, here comes the trail­er for The Dark Crys­tal: Age of Resis­tance, a pre­quel to Jim Hen­son​‘s 1982 fea­ture. Hen­son was con­sid­ered a pio­neer at the time for cham­pi­oning live-action ani­ma­tron­ics over any oth­er jig­gery-pok­ery, and this new film will car­ry on his mission.

Direc­tor Louis Leter­ri­er has been vocal about his com­mit­ment to cre­at­ing char­ac­ters through old-school pup­petry, and the dis­tinct­ly off-putting effect has been duly repli­cat­ed here, the mutat­ed roden­tia mov­ing with the same herky-jerky qual­i­ty of their ​’80s fore­bears. But again, these real char­ac­ters have been immersed in a CGI won­der­land mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to dis­cern the bound­aries between real­i­ty and the digital.

Taron Egerton, Anya Tay­lor-Joy, and Nathalie Emmanuel voice a trio of ​“Gelflings,” myth­i­cal crea­tures hail­ing from the world of Thra (though, in a truer sense, they come from the Uncan­ny Val­ley). They set out on a grand mis­sion to recov­er a tal­is­man of great and ter­ri­ble pow­er to use in the bat­tle against the Skek­sis, vul­ture-drag­on-lizard mon­sters at the heart of child­hood night­mares stretch­ing from Gen X to the millennials.

These locked-away trau­mas will all be set free when the pre­quel arrives on Net­flix, shak­ing loose the fear­ful mem­o­ries of snap­ping beaks and karo-syrupy flesh long since buried. In this critic’s opin­ion, it’s about high time, too; too much nos­tal­gia-bait seeks to cod­dle its audi­ence with warm remem­brances of child­hood, instead of haul­ing the most fright­en­ing bits out of our psy­cho­log­i­cal vaults.

The Dark Crys­tal: Age of Resis­tance will appear on Net­flix in the US and UK on 30 August.