Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Presuming that Trolls Band Together represents the conclusion of DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls Trilogy – and given DreamWorks’s historical and ongoing shamelessness about resurrecting any franchise whose brand name seems to have a few dollars left to squeeze out of it, this is a terrible presumption – the least we can say is that leaves us […]

DreamWorks Animation, once the unlovely home of such crimes against animation as Shark Tale and Bee Movie, has been quietly handing Disney and Pixar their asses on a platter for so long now that it should no longer come as a surprise when it happens, but it still feels like Puss in Boots: The Last […]

I have mentioned more than once that DreamWorks Animation has become the most stylistically interesting of the major American animation studios,* more or less out of commercial necessity: their films make less money so they have lower budgets, and since they have lower budgets they can’t rely on raw processing power to put things over, […]

2013’s The Croods is a pretty comfortably average effort from DreamWorks Animation, with  the rather serious caveat that DreamWorks’ average is low enough that this is neither an impressive nor a promising bar to clear. So the existence of a seven-years-later sequel is certainly not the kind of thing that fills a body with optimism, […]

The 2016 film Trolls isn’t flawless by any means, but it is, nonetheless, one of crucial films in the late development of DreamWorks Animation. It was the first film the studio released after a major restructuring took place that fundamentally changed its financial strategy, and while Trolls was itself largely a product of the previous […]

Nothing about Abominable is even mildly surprising (unless it’s that an English-language movie made by American creators and mostly at an American animation studio should be set in China and have a female protagonist, and neither of these facts are even briefly commented upon), which is kind of a great thing. It doesn’t feel like […]

Nine years ago, How to Train Your Dragon became the first film to demonstrate that DreamWorks Animation could be more than The House That Shrek Built; the first film to eschew the lazy pop culture references, music cues and shticky jokes based on celebrity personae and just go out and make a rich-looking, emotionally resonant […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: there are ants in Ant-Man and the Wasp. There are ants in other things also, but only rarely as […]

If we weren’t through the rabbit hole before, we sure as hell are now: DreamWorks Animation has made a film that is literally about potty humor, sixteen years after their Shrek normalised fart jokes in animated features, and about how people who don’t like potty humor are joyless assholes, and it is the sweetest, nicest, […]

If you had asked me ten years ago, when Shrek the Third was farting its way through theaters, which major American animation studio I expected to be pushing the medium forward the most in 2017, between Pixar, Disney, or the Shrekmeisters at DreamWorks, I would have frankly looked at you like you’d just grown two […]

The notorious dance party ending is a plague upon all animated films, but it is perhaps a particularly important element in the films of DreamWorks Animation; it was that studio’s 2001 Shrek that did more than probably any other individual title to cement the trope into place, and they’ve relied on it extensively in the […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: thirteen years later, Finding Nemo finally gets a sequel in Finding Dory. In contrast, it took less than sixteen […]