Disney's Competition Part 3: Dreamworks

The other company that has challenged Disney at the movie theaters is Dreamworks Animation. With a sixteen year run (so far) of creative movies, some good and some forgettable, Dreamworks has managed to garner more popularity and finances than Don Bluth's animation team did and has managed to last til the present time (you might remember that How to Train Your Dragon 2 is about to hit theaters).

The Start

It all starts with one man's dream of creating high quality animated movies (sounds a little familiar right?). Jeffrey Katzenberg is a movie producer who had previously worked for Disney's studio before moving on to establish his own company (again, very familiar background here).

How well did the company do starting out? Just take a look at the first movies that Dreamworks Animation created.

Wait, wasn't this made by Pixar?

Good, but the book was better

We made a movie about gold. That means box office gold, right?

BINGO!

While the first few movies did all right during their original release and have gone on to become somewhat popular on DVD, the thing that made Dreamworks a major rival to Disney was Shrek. For many reasons, this is the first major hit for Dreamworks, which means they would go on to milk this cash cow for all it's worth as we all now know, with the sequels, the Christmas special, and the stage musical all created over time.

The Plateau of Meh

From there, Dreamworks began to produce more animated features as various and creative as the early movies they produced. Some were based in classic 2-D animation style, and yet kind of fell in to obscurity over the years.

What do ya know, a fantasy pirate movie made in the 00s. 

Watching people ride horses is not as fun as actually riding horses

For the record (and I guess I should have mentioned this earlier in the series) the popularity of animated films is somewhat subjective. Some of you might say that one of these movies was a classic from your childhood that you remember every detail of because of how much of classic it was while some of you might look at that same movie and go "Since when was this a thing?".

Anywho, Dreamworks also brought in some British claymation that they can't take credit for creating, but at least they can take credit for bringing them to the attention of an American audience.

Starring: Mel Gibson's fake American accent

Were-Rabbit? There-Rabbit.

After these movie releases, however, we start getting into the more forgettable and computer-generated focus of Dreamworks Animation.

"Will Smith Fish" just wasn't as catchy of a title.

Tried to make Jerry Sienfeld funny again

Dreamworks trying to flush their own company down the drain?

Don't push me cause I'm close to the hedge

Back to the Hits.

While these movies are not necessarily the worst movies ever, they were not on par with any animated classics that came before it, whether from Dreamworks or otherwise. The one Dreamworks animated movie that was able to make a huge smash at the box office during this time period was...

Filmed on location in Madagascar and at the Central Park Zoo

I think that this movie played a huge part in keeping Dreamworks Animation afloat. This portion of history for Dreamworks is similar to what happened to Don Bluth in the 90s where he had a string of moderate, mediocre movies out there with one or two huge successes here and there. The biggest, most popular animated movies from Dreamworks during this time was Madagascar and Shrek along its sequels. Had it not been for these two franchises, we may not have Dreamworks Animation today. Notice that none of the movies said "From the creators of Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas and Bee Movie" or "From the creators of Antz and Flushed Away".

It was all about Shrek  and Madagascar. That is, until Dreamworks knocked kid's socks off with...

For once, a Jack Black comedy that paid off.

Making kids want a pet dragon even more 

I do not know how Dreamworks managed to put these two giant hits together in such a short time, but these are the movies that helped cement Dreamworks Animation as a modern animation giant with a unique style of computer-generated animation. Even Monsters vs. Aliens, which came out around this time, got some attention, though maybe not as much as the other two above.

Though I think if the whole thing had been about the Stephen Colbert-voiced President character,
it would have been a mega blockbuster success of a film.

Recent Efforts and Legacy Thus Far

Because of these big successes, Dreamworks Animation has gone on to create massive amounts of sequels of their hit franchises. However, in recent time, they have continued their pattern of making uniquely creative CGI movies.

This movie will blow your mind!

It was hard to get the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman, their schedules were pretty booked

So, does Vin Diesel voice one of the snails?

From the creators of "Rocky and Bullwinkle"...wait...

So, what is the legacy of Dreamworks Animation so far? Well, they have really managed to dig in to the modern focus of computer-generated animation. Their animation style and artistry is probably only matched by Pixar. Save for Shrek, if any of the older movies that they made (the ones that came before Madagascar) are well-known, they are known because of a cult-following they received after coming out on DVD and video.

It's hard to tell the legacy of Dreamworks Animation for certain. Except for Shrek none of the movies have been around long enough to be considered animated classics like Don Bluth and company's The Secret of N.I.M.H.. I think that Dreamworks will manage to be around longer than Don Bluth's animation team, which is due to the amount of box-office successes they have had and the amount of movies that they have produced.

While I do not necessarily like the approach of turning one successful movie in to a cash-cow franchise, it has certainly been helpful for Dreamworks not only at the movie theaters, but in television as well. Movies like Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar and How to Train Your Dragon have received their own TV series, which can be seen on the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network channels. That kind of effort has managed to keep Dreamworks Animation in the spotlight and has allowed them to experiment with many creative movies and allowed them to overcome any flops or forgettable movies along the way.

Are they the same classic quality as Disney? It's hard to tell right now. I would say that the animation quality is vastly different from the classic Disney films, but that means that Dreamworks has managed to find its own path to go, rather than copy the Disney art style and choices.

So now that we've covered who the companies are that competed against Disney, next we'll dig deeper in to the "how" they have competed before looking to the future of animation.