2012
02.06

Typically I like to start my reviews off by giving a brief history of the people behind whatever I’m reviewing, but I believe I’ll keep this particular retrospective a bit briefer than usual.

DreamWorks, Disney’s greatest rival in animation during the past 10 years, formed in 1994 as a merger between world-renowned auteur Steven Spielberg, former head of Disney’s animated feature department Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film producer David Geffen in order to continue making successful Hollywood movies. As a studio, they’ve made such well-liked and artistically successful features as Sam Mendes’ 1999 Best Picture-winning debut American Beauty, Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, and Spielberg’s own influential Saving Private Ryan. Along with fellow Best Picture winners Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind, these movies have proven to be critic and crowd pleasing hits, reflective of our modern movie-making abilities.

However, when one thinks of DreamWorks, it’s their animated features that come to mind. While DreamWorks has been making computer generated animated movies since Antz in 1998, as well as enjoyable albeit lesser talked about hand-drawn efforts such as The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado, what really gave life to the studio’s animation department was 2001’s Shrek, a fractured fairy tale that could be interpreted as an anti-Disney stance, and given Katzenberg’s history with the house that the Mouse built, this wouldn’t be too far off. Shrek was lewd, crude, and occasionally not as clever as it thought it was, but otherwise, was an hilarious change of pace from the typical Disney and Pixar type of movie. More importantly, it was also a major critical and commercial success, making more than four times it’s budget back domestically, and beat out Pixar favorite Monsters. Inc at the Academy’s first award for Best Animated Picture.

So it’s fair to call Shrek a hit. So much so that DreamWorks has helped to make the green ogre one of the decade’s biggest cash cows, a modern cultural icon. After the first Shrek’s incredible success, other CG animated films were to follow, most of which earning at least a lean $100 million at the box office, and helping to put the studio at the top of the modern animation food chain. DreamWorks has shelled out at least one animated feature a year, each usually following an audience-approved comedic formula in which a group of eccentric goofs go on a wacky, typically pop culture and flatulence-laden adventure(Kung-Fu Panda is one of the few that cuts down no these aspects for humor, and uses character and physical comedy at the center to earn a laugh for a change. This reviewer highly recommends KFP as viewing if you haven’t given it a spin yet.)

Next to be mentioned should be Chris Sanders. With fellow co-director Dean DeBlois, they made Lilo & Stitch for Disney, one of their biggest and most entertaining animated hits of the aughts. The story of an alien experiment gone horribly wrong that leaves it’s home planet to find shelter on the planet Earth and finds comfort in a fellow outcast of a girl touched the hearts of many fans of animation in an era where Disney’s all-mighty touch on the audience was starting to fade out. The little blue Stitch, who also was voiced by Sanders, became so well-liked by the people that he and his little girl partner would star in three sequels and a popular TV series together, while for years on end Stitch proved to be one of Disney’s best selling characters, with various bits of merchandise, Disney theme park attractions, and even a Japanese animated series dedicated to him. The movie’s lasting appeal still continues to shine with a long-anticipated special edition DVD making it’s way stateside, containing an over two-hour-long documentary showing us the process of making such an endeavor.

As any filmmaker who made a successful entity should, another film was already in plan for Sanders. He had another feature planned for Disney, American Dog, which in 2006 he was booted from after disagreements from newly-minted head of animation John Lasseter, who believed that the story, which supposedly took elements from future Pixar releases Toy Story 3 and Cars 2, was going nowhere. Sanders then left and joined DreamWorks’ animation department. A few tweaks and a new director in Chris Williams later and now we have the movie known as Bolt.

Here he and Lilo co-director DeBlois reunited to work on an animated movie that had similar development issues, How to Train Your Dragon. The movie was originally intended to follow the book more faithfully, but under Sanders and DeBlois’ direction, was spiced up a bit to appeal to older children and even people over the usual demographic for animated features. Usually DreamWorks animation staff doesn’t think of what someone like yours truly will think of their movies, but will instead add a risqué joke or two to keep parents from falling asleep. However, the idea of constructing a story with thought, merit, and character development like Pixar makes doesn’t always come to the studio’s mind.

It looks like that trend is broken with How to Train Your Dragon, which has entertained and even moved this reporter a bit.

The movie takes us to Berk, a village where fighting dragons is as common as making pie. We show up in the middle of a dragon invasion where our lead character, Hiccup, announces to us by narration that slaying dragons is a way of life for the Vikings of Berk. Hiccup is the son of Stoick the Vast, the chief of the village. Stoick is a big Viking, like most of the people of Berk, which Hiccup can’t admit to being at all. Compared to most of the Vikings in the village, Hiccup is a small potato. He’s also awkward and gawky, and proves to be unable to stand out among his peers.

Hiccup’s dream is to prove himself to his father and to slay a dragon. After the glorious looking opening battle, he finds a Night Fury, a dragon that is next-to-unknown to dragon researchers, in the woods and keeps an eye on him. After their secret encounter, Stoick realizes that it’s time for Hiccup to learn how to slay a dragon, and sends him to dragon fighting classes. Here, he and a group of fellow kids are taught by the stern but charming Gobbler the basics of dragon slaying. This is where most of the humor comes from in the movie, when Gobbler has the Vikings-in-training go through intense obstacles to practice the art of dragon slaying. As Gobbler, Craig Ferguson has a bit of fun with the little Vikings, staying true to his late night persona while also adding in some warmth into the story when Hiccup needs to hear a kind voice. Celebrity casting over personal actors tends to be a weakness of DreamWorks animation department but Ferguson is a highlight for the cast. The rest of the cast of Vikings are also fun, but the real bread and butter of the story comes from Hiccup’s encounters with the Night Fury.

Hiccup learns a lot about Night Furys, maintaining dragons, and about himself in general with Toothless, which he names after it hides it’s teeth while not eating. After each meeting Hiccup adds things into the official dragon manual about Night Furys, and learns some new techniques to keep himself alive in training. Hiccup eventually becomes the toast of the town and the desired student to slay his first dragon in front of an audience. However, the more time he spends with Toothless, the more Hiccup regrets the method of slaying dragons. But Hiccup still wants to appease his father.

I’m not going to say anymore on the story, or say that the movie ends in predictable form. While the ending will seem expected, Sanders and DeBlois take some liberties with Hiccup’s fate that you wouldn’t see in an average kids movie, and helps to make the movie a more powerful experience than your typical kids feature being put out.

And that’s probably why I liked Dragon so much. It’s the first computer generated DreamWorks animated feature that comes to mind that instead of bashing Disney, follows their blueprints of solid family entertainment more closely, making a family-friendly drama that also happens to have humor in it. Instead of adding goofy sidekicks that add to cheap laughs more than to actual story, the humor comes from the junior Viking’s squabbles and confused dialogue, which works more for belly laughs than harder laughs, but the humor meshes into Hiccup’s story well.

Hiccup’s relationship between Toothless feels realistic and emotional, like a kid who finds a pet he knows he can’t have but loves all the same. This effect isn’t surprising, considering that Sanders and DeBlois made us feel similarly about an oddball and their unusual pet a good eight years ago with Lilo & Stitch. Seeing Hiccup control Toothless on his first flight is a staggering piece of CG animation, which should look breathtaking on standard definition, let alone movie theater 3D. It’s also a key point of the film. Here Hiccup has learned enough about dragons and Night Furys to find a way to make it stay up in the air with him on it. Hiccup finally proves his resourcefulness and Toothless shows that it completely trusts Hiccup. The rest, with Hiccup losing his notes while up in the air and seeming to just not care, is stunning.

The animation is probably the best this reporter has seen of DreamWorks to date, and probably the best use of 3D in recent years. Effects such as a burning fire, waving water, and lifted dirt are brought to life with such attention to detail that the effects animators deserve the highest praise possible. The human’s desings keep up to DreamWorks usual look, but the designs of the dragons deserve equal praise. Toothless looks incredible, a nicely painted black fitting into a more colorful world, while the other dozen or so dragons used in the feature also have little subtlies that make them look equally as thought-out and desirable. For example, this reporter went to McDonalds to get one of the movie’s collectable toys, and came home with a Hideous Zippleback, a double-headed thing that calls to me as a cross between reptile and a less, well, hideous take on the double-headed dragon from Warner’s forgettable Quest for Camelot.

That‘s one reason why I seem to be so positive towards the .movie. Dragons happen to be a love affair for this reporter. One of the Disney sequences that called back to me when I was younger was when Maleficent transformed into a dragon with the powers of all hell in Sleeping Beauty, I had an addiction to American Dragon: Jake Long that lasted long after the show’s final episode aired, and I tend to pick dragons over other creatures when given the chance. I tend to eat these mythical creatures up with arms wide open, and seeing yet another world where humans and dragons interact touches my creativity like few others can.

This would mean nothing if the source material that these dragons come from was weak. Sleeping Beauty has a power antagonist in Maleficent that sucks up screen time whenever she appears and also has a fun bit of chemistry in the fairies, while Jake Long gave us a lead character whose hopes to be an average teenager were shattered by expectations that only his stern but loving grandfather could see in him and have us follow him on the way as he discovers his abilities and the pain of loss and heartache that he experiences because of them, and Dragon has an awkward kid find a kindred spirit in an undiscovered beauty, which eventually helps him understand the merits of a little known about species. Like Avatar without jamming the message our visual effects down our throats.

DreamWorks seems to be selling itself thin now. Between this and a hugely popular animated series based on the penguins from the Madagascar movies, we have a fourth spin into the world of Shrek, a more typical DreamWorks feature in the Will Ferell-lead Megamind, and a series based off of Kung-Fu Panda this year alone, not to mention a sequel for Panda next year. As of right now, I’m going to call How to Train Your Dragon the DreamWorks project of the year to see, and an early forerunner for the Academy’s Best Animated Picture. Maybe it’s time for another movie of theirs to win the award, so the first Shrek won’t feel so lonely. I’d give it a nomination, at least.

Originally posted on Tuesday, March 30, 2010.

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