Hey, Say Something Nice About DreamWorks!

A friend of mine who is a big fan of DreamWorks and their How To Train Your Dragon film franchise posted one day about how frustrated she is at how people talk about DreamWorks. The idea that they are a bad studio, that they are inferior to the “masters” at Disney and Pixar, that they’re naturally second-best, etc.

I’m not going to say that this is true of the entire population, but I feel that a lot of folks out there give DreamWorks Animation, a studio that is going to be turning 25 later this year, an undeservedly bad rap.

We’re actually on the threshold of a new era for this old studio. Overseas, the third and final installment of the How To Train Your Dragon series is playing, it opens here in a matter of days. This is the first film of theirs to be distributed by Universal Pictures, now that the studio is owned by Comcast. Even though DreamWorks was acquired by the media giant in the fall of 2016, the few movies that were still in the can and released throughout 2017 were still part of their distribution deal with 20th Century Fox. Whatever they planned on releasing in 2018 either got delayed (Dragon), put in limbo (Puss in Boots 2, Madagascar 4), or outright cancelled (Larrikins). How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World begins a new era for the studio. Between the acquisition and now, their future slate was being shepherded and overseen by former WB executive Chris DeFaria. He has recently left, and Margie Cohn has taken his spot, she will run both the feature film division and the TV division, which has been the company’s saving grace during their roughest years. DeFaria laid the foundation, now we shall see what Cohn does with it all. Going by early reception of How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, something promising seems to be in store here.

So why is it that DreamWorks get shuffled aside by some critics, some animation fans, and some commentators? Why don’t most of their movies get the same general public love as other animated films from studios like Pixar, Illumination, and various others?

DreamWorks has had many successful films at the box office outside of the Shrek franchise. All three Kung Fu Panda movies did good business, How To Train Your Dragon and it sequels made a lot of coin, the Madagascar movies made mad cash (sans the spin-off Penguins of Madagascar), and so on… Yet I barely hear people talk about them, reference them, act as if they even exist. I don’t hear something like Kung Fu Panda get brought up in the way something like Frozen or Despicable Me or just about any given Pixar movie is. These movies did well at the box office, did the public just… Forget about them? What is up that?

I pondered… What makes an animated film such a long-lasting flavor with the general public? Not us film and animation lovers, not us aficionados… Just the general public that watch movies as a mere diversion and so on. I thought about the various films that are often called the best, or the films that immediately come to people’s minds when you ask them “What are some great movies”? You can probably list them now, something that reads like the user-determined IMDb Top 250… The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, The Dark Knight, etc. etc. I also thought about FoxxFur’s review of Disney’s Robin Hood for her excellent ‘The Age of Not Believing’ series of posts on her Passport2Dreams blog… In one passage she said:

It’s the only of the Disney 70s films to be still widely watched. If you asked people to start listing Disney movies they’d eventually hit Robin Hood, well behind the major 90s hits but still ahead of something like The Fox & the Hound or The Rescuers. It’s well remembered and it’s one of those Disney movies that gets a new video release every few years without having to be retired to the “Vault” to artificially inflate demand.

Robin Hood perhaps got its popularity through video sales and Disney Channel airings in the 80s and 90s, particularly when its second home video release began its lengthy run as an “always available” title. But it was never really held in high regard by many, but folks who grew up in the 80s and 90s probably watched it plenty of times, given how easy-going and digestible it is, same with the very similar The Sword in the Stone. If anything, I see something of a surge in Fox and the Hound love, a film that just seemed to be “there” prior to this decade.

If any DreamWorks movie is of “widely watched” status, it’s Shrek and Shrek 2. A close second is probably one of the Madagascar movies. But any love for Kung Fu Panda and How To Train Your Dragon and such? Even a pretty successful flick like 2009’s Monsters vs. Aliens? Not much, from my end. Why? The panda and dragon movies were loved by many critics and made a good amount of money each time out (with the Kung Fu Panda trilogy, it was a steady decline at the domestic box office), you’d think they’d have more of a presence in the moviesphere…

Actually, what’s surprising is that DreamWorks still hasn’t made a feature film that topped $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Shrek 2 came close to that in 2004 without the aid of 3D, IMAX, or anything like that. If you adjusted all the worldwide ticket sales (IMPOSSIBLE), it would probably be significantly higher than a billion. The closest a non-Shrek movie got to that kind of gross was the third Madagascar movie in 2012. Both Kung Fu Panda 2 and How To Train Your Dragon 2 didn’t perform like Shrek 2 did, but to be fair, most sequels don’t make much more than their predecessors. Most of the time, they make less, or stay flat.

But grosses be damned, I just wonder why these two movies haven’t hit that spot that the first two Shreks have. The first two Shreks were a phenomenon back in the early-to-mid aughts, but I suppose that’s because its PG-rated mixture of audience-satisfying storytelling, grossness, and middle school-level dirty jokes just hit it for audiences… Something that didn’t work out as well with the third film, and something that seemed absent from the fourth one, which did decent business in the states. Shrek and Shrek 2 hit a sweet spot, and it was one of those animated things that was “cool” and “acceptable” for people who either can’t watch most animation or can’t admit to watching/liking it.

But edginess aside, what about all the more family-friendly stuff that’s iconic? Why aren’t the Kung Fu Panda and How To Train Your Dragon trilogies in line with the Toy Story trilogy, the Disney Renaissance hits, Despicable Me, and even milder “well-known” animated flicks like Ice Age? Maybe it’s just a sort-of luck-based thing. Film fans of course would know these films, but it seems like only a few animated pictures get that general public seal. The ones that they immediately say “I know that! Great film!” to.

So this ties back into the question… Why is DreamWorks sometimes looked down upon?

Is it the overwhelming success of the Shrek movies and the Shrek-lites they spawned? I understand being upset at DreamWorks for ushering out traditionally animated movies between the releases of Shrek and Shrek 2, leading to the industry-wide purge of films done in that medium, though that’s more on former CEO/co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg than an entire studio. Anyways, as for following Shrek‘s success… With Shrek doing so well, Katzenberg and his upper-hand folks basically did what most animation executives did back then, and certainly what he did when he was at Disney Feature Animation in the early 90s: Apply a formula to future features. At Disney, Katzenberg saw to it that Beauty and the Beast wouldn’t be the Jon Cocteau-esque film it was meant to be and had it retooled into “The Little Mermaid but in 18th Century France”, and the following features (Aladdin, The Lion King) were similarly molded. At DWA? The next wave of features had to have what Shrek had. There had to modern attitude, farts, blatant references to popular things.

Shark Tale, Bee Movie, whatever, that era has been over for 12 years. It was like a… What? 4 year stretch? Not even. They’re not the pop culture joke-spewing, fart joke-toting studio they once were. One viewing of the Kung Fu Panda trilogy and the How To Train Your Dragon films more than seals that, along with viewings of Rise of the Guardians and even some of their recent harmless comedies. Sure, Trolls and its glitter farts and Boss Baby with its toilet humor may suggest that they indeed haven’t evolved, but we might as well accuse Pixar and Disney Animation of this for their occasional gross-out jokes. I never heard anyone complain about the yellow snow jokes and “tinkle in the woods” lyric in Frozen, nor did I hear anyone use the few potty jokes in Toy Story 3 against Pixar as a whole. How is “fish pee in you!” line in Moana funny, but not a similar joke in DreamWorks picture? Or… People will remark “Disney/Pixar, why is there DreamWorks humor in your movies?”

And hey, fart jokes and pop culture references were in animated films before there even was a DreamWorks!

Oh, but the story… But have you seen the aforementioned films? If you genuinely had issues with Kung Fu Panda, How To Train Your Dragon, and their other acclaimed post-Shrek movies, then I don’t know what to tell you. Different strokes, I ‘spose.

DreamWorks, for whatever faults they may have had then and now, were at least a studio that aimed to go a little above what Disney’s competition was putting out. While The Prince of Egypt recalls the Renaissance Disney epics (an extension of what Katzenberg was doing with The Lion King and Pocahontas), the early CG DreamWorks movies were things like Antz and Shrek. The 2D unit moved onto things like The Road to El Dorado and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Whether we like how they executed their initial strategy or not, they at least tried something a little different. They could’ve been like the competitors, and just put out some Disney-lite things like Quest for Camelot and The Swan Princess. No, they weren’t necessarily the next Ralph Bakshi or even the next Don Bluth, but they did a little something early on. They also helped bring Aardman’s first ever feature film to completion, and in the process, the two studios made the masterpiece that is Chicken Run. Aardman has made and continues to make features, even if they’ve moved on from DreamWorks.

Sadly, nothing was corrected. DreamWorks’ post-Prince of Egypt 2D films all failed to break even, and not only was that medium retired at DWA, but also those types of movies. Years and years later, Jeffrey Katzenberg even expressed bewilderment at how “dark” The Prince of Egypt was. One can argue that shreds of this old DreamWorks are in films like How To Train Your Dragon. We can waffle on all day about how he watered Disney’s animation down for a kiddie audience but pursued adult-oriented stuff when DreamWorks was started, but… He doesn’t lead the charge anymore, and times have changed. We may very well get a very different kind of DreamWorks in the future, which only adds to their eclectic history. A studio like Pixar, while they’ve impressed with their many movies, sticks to a clear goal. DreamWorks has had multiple ones, being run by different people with different ideas of what to do: Serious epics for big kids and up, edgy comedies for preteens, balanced family-friendly adventures, goofy romps… They’ve gone many directions. Some see that as a fault, but I see that as fascinating. DreamWorks’ output should be eclectic, honestly. Trying different things doesn’t make a movie fall short, it’s all in the writing and character work. That’s all subjective…

The line-up that Chris DeFaria initiated, should it stick over the next 4-5 years, seems like a smorgasbord. We already have How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, alongside continuations of “goofy romp” DreamWorks (Trolls 2, Croods 2, and Boss Baby 2), more seemingly cutesy fun stuff like Abominable, fantasy epics like Mice and Mystics and The Wizards of Once (based on the books by Train Your Dragon author Cressida Cowell), a slew of films planned by Guillermo del Toro (!!!), a horror collaboration with Blumhouse (!!!!!!!), cultural stories like Yokai Samba, and such. The sequels you might be complaining about will just fund these, really. Then you have to factor in what Margie Cohn will greenlight… It was she who oversaw *little* things like… Guillermo del Toro’s Trollhunters and the new She-Ra and Harvey Street Kids and… Yeah… She’s running BOTH TV and features. Amazing, she must be up to it.

DreamWorks is one of the older animation studios of the current crop, so there has to be growing pains, changes, transitions, etc. Blue Sky may be 7 years older than DreamWorks, but they didn’t release their first feature until 3 1/2 years after DreamWorks released their first. The Walt Disney feature animation wing enjoyed nearly four decades of unparalleled success because Walt was there, and there’s no leader other like Walt. Many have tried to be that proverbial next Walt Disney, but none of them stack up. Without Walt, and with different people running the show and diluting the animation studio in the ’70s, things changed. Then new people came in years later, things changed. So on, so forth. Whose to say DreamWorks can’t have a long, prosperous era of top-notch animated movies? Whose to say they are a naturally inferior studio to Disney Animation and Pixar? I put all the studios on the same level, I know any given animation studio with the talent can be capable of making greatness. Did you see Sony Animation? They made The Emoji Movie in 2017, people unanimously agreed it was horrible. Flash-forward to last December, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse broke ground, is collecting awards left and right, got critical raves, and has brought the animation community together like no other film I’ve seen in maybe the last… 15 years??

Whose to say DreamWorks can’t do things like that? They’ve done similarly cool things before, and they can certainly keep doing them. The talent’s there, has been there. The folks running the joint just gotta do like Leon Schlesinger and just say, “We’ll leave you guys to it, just stay within budget and schedule.” That’s how most feature animation should be run in my opinion. No wannabe Walt Disneys (because again, Walt was one of a kind), no controlling heads who don’t see greatness or potential in the animated medium. Maybe Margie Cohn is in that golden middle, we’ll see over the next decade.

DreamWorks Animation LLC is a good studio, people.