Cory McAbee

Many films try to take you back to those nostalgic days of childhood through images and stories, but Crazy & Thief gives you an actual voyeuristic view of the world through the eyes of a seven-year-old and a two-year-old that naturally takes its audience back to that time in their lives when the world was all ankles and adventure. Much like Calvin and Hobbes would take to their forest-filled backyard for adventure, Yaya aka Crazy (Willa Vy McAbee) and Johnny aka Thief (John Huck McAbee) take to their “backyard,” the streets of Manhattan, on a quest to find a time machine (naturally). After creating their own star map (or treasure map, depending on how you look at it), Crazy and Thief set out to follow the various stars to see where they lead them. Structured like a storybook, the film follows different chapters as these two mini shoplifters (kids gotta eat!) encounter various “characters” along the way. Much like the kids in children’s books and cartoons invent monsters (usually born from misinterpreted shadows), Crazy & Thief takes audiences directly into that imaginative mindset and shows us how children can view adults when they are pretending with chapters titled “Cyclops” and “Giant.” This idea of depicting a living storybook is furthered with Yaya drawing pictures (much like those you would find in these books) on the map to mark where they have been and what they have seen.


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