Several years ago, it seems, DreamWorks Animation seemed to have turned a major corner with How to Train Your Dragon – or was it really just this past March? It feels longer, at any rate, since that film came along and showed that the studio born from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s pathological (and entirely justifiable) hatred of […]

A series of rattletrap Disney parodies put out by DreamWorks Animation whenever they need quick access an amount of ready cash greater than the gross domestic product of any given African nation, the Shrek films have never exactly been my cup of tea: they’re snitty rather than clever, they shoulder most of the responsibility for […]

Of all the signs and portents that we are drawing near to the end of human civilisation (floods! earthquakes! economic strife! global unrest!) none has scared me more than this: at last, DreamWorks Animation has made a great animated film; a Pixar-quality film, if I dare say it, despite fear of my blasphemy bringing down […]

Oh, Henry Selick has absolutely pwn3d Jeffrey Katzenberg. Pwn3d the hell out of him. For what feels like about five years, Katzenberg has been promising everyone who would listen that the first quarter of 2009 was going to bear witness to THE 3-D movie, the one that would knock us all on our asses with […]

So, like a clockwork plague, the year’s second DreamWorks Animation feature has stumbled into theaters, and while this summer’s Kung Fu Panda was a shockingly decent effort for the typically underwhelming studio, I’m sad but totally unsurprised to announce that the resolutely unneeded sequel Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is not. Though it is, to be […]

Whatever else may be said of Kung Fu Panda, I know this much is true: it is by far the most visually appealing film yet released by DreamWorks Animation. They’re certainly not in the same league as the masters of the universe over at Pixar, but they’ve never been closer; but maybe at about the […]

There’s a by now ubiquitous story about the origins of Bee Movie: Steven Spielberg and Jerry Seinfeld were having lunch one day (well, of course they were!) when Seinfeld mused that it would be amusing to make a cartoon about bees, and title it Bee Movie, because you see it sounds kind of like “B-movie,” […]

I would like to share a bit of received wisdom with you all: you can’t tell somebody that what they’re laughing at isn’t funny. Thankfully, nobody in the theater where I saw Shrek the Third was laughing very much at all, so I don’t have to pretend that it was anything other than a complete […]

It is with all due humility that I admit that a film that I hadn’t really been looking forward to turned out to be one of the funniest films I’ve seen all year. I give you: Flushed Away, the third Aardman Animation feature released through Dreamworks, and the first to be wholly computer-animated. If you […]

Oh my god, it’s finally not an agony to post. And look at me, being all “hugely busy at work,” so I just now find out. The June Plan has its first casualty – that is, the first film I would probably not have seen without the extra bump of motivation (that I saw The […]