NEVER NOT BE AFRAID!: The head of a family living in a cave in the Stone Age and headed by Grug (voiced by Nicolas Cage, far right) sets out on a perilous journey in search of a safer place to live. Grug constantly reminds them to “never not be afraid” because from his experience the world is a very, very dangerous place.

Are you better off than you were four million years ago? That’s the evolutionary question playfully posed by The Croods, a visually captivating action cartoon about a family of cave dwellers who summon up their courage to abandon their home in the face of an impending climate change.

The enchanting movie was co-directed by Kirk De Micco (Space Chimps) and Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon), who assembled a cast featuring Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, and Cloris Leachman to breathe life into a colorful array of prehistoric characters. Besides the talented voice cast, the film effectively uses 3-D technology to guarantee that the audience will be enthralled by ducking projectiles aimed directly at their heads or trying to touch objects dangling just out of reach.

At the point of departure we find the Croods huddled inside their dank dark cave where they sleep together in a pile to keep warm at night. The family is presided over by Grug (Cage), an overprotective patriarch whose mantra is the double-negative “Never not be afraid!”

The other members of the clan include a nagging mother-in-law Gran (Leachman), long-suffering wife Ugga (Catherine Keener), and their three children: baby Sandy (Randy Thom), man-child Thunk (Clark Duke), and rebellious teen Eep (Stone). Grug feels it is his duty to remind them on a daily basis of the many dangers lurking just beyond the entrance of their boulder-fortified abode.

That’s why he’s so fond of telling bedtime stories in which any curiosity about what happens in the outside world invariably proves fatal. Grug’s scare tactics work until the fateful day Eep sneaks off to explore on her own and encounters a boy named Guy (Reynolds) about her own age.

Not only has Guy figured out how to harness fire to keep hungry creatures at bay but he forecasts imminent doom for any one who fails to move to higher ground. When Eep brings word of this frightening development to her father, it becomes abundantly clear that it’s going to take more than a little convincing to get him to lead the family out of the cave on a perilous trek to safety.

Mother Nature plays a part in nudging him to grudgingly join forces with Guy, and the ensuing journey across a vast wasteland to Shangri-La allows for a priceless lesson about risk-taking as relevant today as it must have been back in the Stone Age. The movie is a side-splitting thrill-a-minute adventure reminiscent of the best of The Flintstones.

Excellent (****). Rated PG for scenes of peril. Running time: 98 minutes. Studio: Dreamworks Animation. Distributor: 20th Century Fox.