In Laman's Terms is a new weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms! This past Tuesday, I began ranking all of the DreamWorks Animation movies from worst to best. With the 18 worst features from the studio out of the way, let's move onto the top 18 movies ever from DreamWorks Animation, including their best movie of all-time.
In Laman's Terms is a new weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!
Twenty-one years after releasing their first movie, DreamWorks Animation is a household name for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it's because your kids love their movies. Perhaps it's because you have nostalgia for the likes of The Road to El Dorado and Shrek. Perhaps you hate how so many DreamWorks characters make the same facial expression. Perhaps you're just a Bee Movie Meme connoisseur. Whatever the reason, we all know about DreamWorks Animation, but how often do we actually contemplate the studios library of titles? The folks at this animation studio have produced thirty-six movies over the last twenty-one years and over the course of two In Laman's Terms editorial columns this week, I'll be ranking all of these films from worst to best.
Get ready to blare All-Star and for an avalanche of celebrity voice-over performances, we're about to dive into the DreamWorks Animation library. Let's start with the studios worst title, which could only be...
Today, we get some details on what everybody was craving...a brand new streaming service! This time around, it was NBCUniversal's time to shine as they finally showed off details regarding their new streaming service, which is officially called. Peacock. Yes, that's the actual name. In announcing its original content today, most
of the revelations were TV-oriented, specifically around planned reboots of Punky Brewster and Saved by the Bell. But one interesting nugget in here is that, like most of these new streaming services, there will be
original films on this service and they'll be provided by movie studios the NBCUNiversal company owns. The three studios providing original contents are Universal (Hmmmmm, is this where The Hunt goes?), Focus
Features and, most interestingly, DreamWorks Animation.
Today, DreamWorks Animation is known for one thing and one thing only: computer-animated movies with pop culture references and pop songs a-plenty. That's a touch unfair to their entire catalog of the studio that also includes deviations from that norm like How to Train Your Dragon or Kung Fu Panda, but there's also no denying that it's an apt summarization of most of their output. The trailer for their newest film, Abominable, feels like a microcosm of all the stereotypes associated with DreamWorks Animation, from an extended belching joke to the closing gag of a yeti dancing around to the tune of Shake It Off by Taylor Swift. That's a DreamWorks Animation movie right there, through and through.
DreamWorks Animation loves sequels almost as much as Disney loves remaking classic animated movies as overly realistic live-action movies. When one considers that this is the same studio that produced four Shrek follow-up's in the 10 years after the first movie's release, it's shocking how this is only the second How to Train Your Dragon sequel since the original film was released in March 2010. A more measured approach to producing sequels to this particular DreamWorks Animation feature has certainly paid off, the newest installment in the series, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, is the weakest entry in the series yet it still manages to stand as one of the best things to come out of the studio responsible for "cookies are for closers".
DreamWorks Animation used to have some real ambition as a studio, or, at least, the promise of ambition. If the radically different tones and aesthetics of their first two films (Antz and The Prince Of Egypt) suggested a studio that could create a wide variety of animated motion pictures, well, they've been inconsistent in fulfilling that promise over the course of the next two decades. For every Shrek (only the first two!), How To Train Your Dragon or Kung Fu Panda that showed real imagination and artistic promise, you also had stuff like The Road To El Dorado, Bee Movie and Trolls that had them chasing other popular animated family movies for quick and easy profits. When it comes to creating worthwhile cinema, ya win some, ya lose some in the world of DreamWorks Animation.
Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants books have been making kid readers across the planet crack up for decades now and yours truly was certainly a major fan of the books when he was a kid. The tales of George and Harold and their own superhero Captain Underpants were these giddy tomes filled with potty humor that made them not only feel different from typical kids literature but also made their humor sensibilities right at home with the kind of humor the typical adolescent child finds funny. Because, really, who under the age of 10 doesn't find the word "Poopypants" utterly hilarious beyond description?
I was a huge reader when I was a kid but few books left as great of an impression on me as Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants books. I read all of the books in that series too many times to count, their gross-out humor making youngsters like myself feel like we were getting away with something inappropriate whilst actually doing some reading. Lord knows I haven't read one of those books in eons (they're still going right? I remember the last one I read as a kid ended on a major cliffhanger that I think only got resolved a few years back), but it's no shocker to me that the books are still relevant enough with today's youngsters to warrant a theatrical movie, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie.
In the esteemed pantheon of movie adaptations of toys, Trolls can at least take pride in the indisputable fact that it's better than the Transformers sequels and Battleship. And amongst its DreamWorks Animation brethren, it's better than the last two Shrek movies! That's sort of the extent of the highest praise I can offer Trolls, a movie that exists solely to sell toys and albums and makes very little attempt to cover that up. Like, I'm not naive, I know there toy executives slobbering over the infinitely better movie Zootopia since that one had limitless potential for stuffed animals and the like. But there's at least a great movie there, so who cares if they make some toys off it?
A week ago today, Shrek turned fifteen years old. One of the biggest animated movies of all-time that shifted the entire zeitgeist of animated filmmaking officially turned fifteen..and no one seemed to care. Buzzfeed didn't write up a thousand articles about "21 Gifs That Make Shrek Totes Relatable", there was no release of the feature on Blu-Ray to commemorate the occasion. Hell, even the official Facebook page for the film made absolutely no mention of the anniversary. Granted, turning 15 isn't typically as big of a deal in the world of marketing as a movie celebrating its tenth or twenty-fifth anniversary of existence, but still, the absolute radio silence on the occasion struck me as shocking.
DreamWorks Animation has been looking for a buyer for a good couple of years now and it's not exactly a state secret why. The studio has had a rough few years financially and being under the ownership of a larger conglomerate would provide much-needed stability. Despite their recent money woes, the concept of DreamWorks getting bought isn't a crazy notion thanks to how many big franchises like Shrek, Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda DreamWorks Animation owns. While their attempts to be bought by SoftBank and Hasbro went nowhere, today brought the news that Comcast has purchased DreamWorks Animation for 3.8 billion dollars.
Perhaps few franchises have managed to be as surprising in their overall quality as the Kung Fu Panda saga, with the first film being a tonal departure for DreamWorks Animation, going for a more restrained tone (no pop culture references to be found here) and carrying a screenplay far more reliant on characterization than past features from the studio like Bee Movie and Shark Tale. Thanks to its massive box office, a sequel, Kung Fu Panda 2, occurred, and it too bucked convention by being far more than cashgrab sequel. Going darker in its story (the entire premise of this follow-up hinges on panda genocide) allowed for the character of Po (Jack Black) to not just retread his arc from the first film but rather grow in new areas (namely, in overcoming his traumatic past).
With a high profile family film like Kung Fu Panda 3 coming out this Friday, it's to be expected that a number of family films have released trailers in order to get them seen in front of prospective audiences coming out to see Po the Panda. We got four trailers to look at today, so let's get started with my favorite of the bunch...
Kubo And The Two Strings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4-6qJzeb3A
Holy hell, how is this being done with stop-motion animation? Every frame of this trailer is absolutely beautiful to look at, but thankfully, there's not just style that one can gawk at in this trailer. I love how this trailer doesn't try to fill every second with hyperactive noise and/or jokes, but rather, establishes the plot, atmosphere and characters in a pleasant manner. All of that, plus, a roster of excellent voice actors (Charlize Theron! Ralph Fiennes! Rooney Mara! Matthew McConaughey!), and that excellent Beatles cover, and yeah, it's super easy for me to dub this as one helluva trailer. Consider Kubo And The Two Strings officially one of my most anticipated movies for the year.
Did ya like the atmospheric beauty of that Kubo trailer? Well, the rest of these trailers substitute that for bathroom humor and dancing to pop songs so....yay?
The Secret Life Of Pets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZJVc_JTI_w
Marking the fourth trailer for The Secret Life Of Pets in the span of seven months (and we've still got five months to go until this movies actually released!), this one brings more of a concrete plot to the proceedings, depicting Max (Louie C.K.), a dog, feeling his life upended when his owner gets a new mutt, Duke (Eric Stonestreet). Basically, it's the same character dynamic Toy Story and Over The Hedge have already done, and this trailer really brings nothing new to the table in terms of plot points or gags. It also looks like they're getting as much mileage as possible out of that heavy metal poodle joke, huh?
The Angry Birds Movie
I was relatively kind to The Angry Birds Movie when its first teaser arrived back in late September, but that goodwill towards its marketing has vanished with this new trailer. All I can really say about this one is that if you've ever had the compulsion to see a movie where Danny McBride spits urine into the eager mouth of Josh Gad, it looks like we've got a movie for you!
Trolls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDnRVKPjj8k
Oh my God.
This is real.
Small, easily marketable and toyetic characters dancing to a modern dad pop song (in this case Watch Me Whip/Watch Me Nae Nae)?
We've reached peak DreamWorks folks.
Hey, remember how good the How To Train Your Dragon movies were? Yeah, those were awesome.
Nine Lives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPxI4yOKdgc
Early candidate for most bizarre project of 2016? I'll say yeah. Was this made by someone nostalgic for the days of late 90's live-action Disney family films (the kind made on the cheap and quick like You Favorite Martian and the That Darn Cat! remake), cause that's the kind of cinema this trailer evoked to me. I kind of wish with a premise ripped straight out of a Tropic Thunder trailer parody they went with a more oddball premise than more of this "dad needs to learn to spend more time with his kid" tripe. I'm also pretty certain nothing Christopher Walken does here will top this beautiful insanity from Gigli:
There is an animated family comedy named B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Organisms starring Seth Rogen and Mellissa McCarthy as crime-fighting ghosts. Their foe? Bill Murray as an evil ghosts. This feature had a plot that basically sounded like a more family-friendly version of the 2013 box office dud R.I.P.D., had Rashida Jones, Matt Bomer and Octavia Spencer in supporting roles, and was slated to be released this past June. However, it was pulled from the release schedule just six-and-a-half months prior to its release. Apparently, the film was in post-production when it was cancelled, to the point that when director Tony Leondis was announced as the director of The Emoji Movie, the press release for that development noted that his previous film, B.O.O., had actually been completed under his watch.
As a studio, DreamWorks and its animation counterpart, DreamWorks Animation, has always fascinated me, its journey of ups and downs never being predictable, but always managing to be riveting (go check out The Men Who Would Be King for an in-depth look at the history of DreamWorks, it's an excellent read!). Now, DreamWorks Animation is on the cusp of releasing a pivotal movie for the company, one that could signal whether their future investment in Chinese cinema (the release in question is was partly animated in China) is a bold paradigm shifting strategy or a misguided endeavor.
Who knew one portly panda could be responsible for so much?
Unless Home pulls off a second weekend like the box office has never seen before, Furious 7 will be number one this weekend. This is easily gonna be one of the biggest movies of the year and garner the largest April opening weekend of all-time. The primary question on everyone's mind right now though is how big this one goes.
The world of sci-fi animaton is surprisingly sparse of huge successes, despite the presence of huge hits like WALL-E and Big Hero 6. Some of the biggest box office bombs of modern animation, whether they be deserved (Mars Needs Moms and Planet 51) or unwarranted (Titan A.E.) can be found here, and while early box office returns suggest Home will easily find it's way into the former category, it's also got more than enough flaws to come up as lacking entry in this subgenre of the animation medium.
Two major features (and one expanding limited release) close out March, and both look like they're in close competition for the number one spot at the box office this weekend. It's tough at first to figure out which of the movies, Get Hard and Home, will be the bigger film, so let's get down to an in-depth analysis of these features,shall we?
Last night, I gave one of 2014's most delightful films, Big Hero 6, a rewatch, and found it be such a glorious experience, especially since I watched it with two viewers who hadn't seen the film in theaters. That rewatch got me thinking about the American animation landscape, and my mind eventually turn it's attention to one particular studio that's been facing some "troubles", to put it lightly, lately: DreamWorks Animation.
A slow news day today (nobody wanted to compete for media attention with the Paul Blart 2 trailer coming out later today) doesn't mean there's nothing to talk about in the world of pop culture. The super duper buzzed drama Whiplash finally enters over 400 theaters this coming weekend, and CBS Films is now getting some distribution help from Lionsgate. But here's something guaranteed to brighten up your day; Bradley Cooper doing some voice work for Rocket Raccoon in Guardians of The Galaxy. Check it out below!
