August Review: Shrek (2001)

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Oh, Shrek. Where to begin with this guy?

That’s a rhetorical question, I know exactly where to start. It all comes back to one man, a man with a vision: to stick it to his former boss.

We meet again, Katzenberg.

There’s a lot of history and tangled truths behind the birth of Shrek, and Jeffrey Katzenberg is at the dead center of it. I was sorely tempted to make this another two-parter like the Black Cauldron review to go into more detail, but I was already running behind schedule with March of the Wooden Soldiers so here’s a slightly condensed version:

Between the disaster that was the making of The Black Cauldron and the glorious premiere of The Lion King, Katzenberg picked up a few tricks when it came to making acclaimed animated features. Then in 1994, Disney CEO Frank Wells was killed in a helicopter accident, and the Magic Kingdom was torn asunder as Michael Eisner took the reins and began his descent into madness. Katzenberg hoped that he would inherit Eisner’s former position of Vice President, but here’s where things get tricky. Katzenberg claims that Eisner fired him when he made his ambitions known; but the way Eisner tells it, Katzenberg was impatient, ungrateful, took way too much credit for the studio’s successes, and left of his own accord. Either way, it was a notoriously bitter separation with deep ramifications for the animation industry. Apparently Disney didn’t learn their lesson with Don Bluth because once again they wound up creating their biggest competitor – and this time, they were here to stay.

Katzenberg teamed up with David Geffen and the one and only Steven Spielberg to create Dreamworks SKG, the first major studio to truly rival Disney when it came to making animated motion pictures. The most important thing to them was to not be like every other feature on the market. For the first few years they flipped between making some great traditionally animated films that have been swept under the rug (Spirit, Sinbad and The Road to El Dorado are enjoying a comfortable cult status online and The Prince of Egypt only just got upgraded to blu-ray last year. Still waiting on that Broadway version, though), and openly trying to one-up their direct competition (when not teaming up Aardman to produce the same but with effort and a soul). Pixar announces their next movie is about ants? Dreamworks comes out the following week and says they’re doing a CGI movie about ants. Pixar says they’re making a film about fish? Dreamworks makes one about fish the following year. They make movies for children of all ages but with A-list actors, no Alan Menken musical numbers, and attituuuuude, dude. And nowhere is that jealousy and vitriol towards Disney more obvious than in what we’re reviewing today.

Shortly after Dreamworks was founded, co-head of the motion pictures division Laurie MacDonald gave Katzenberg a book by esteemed children’s author/illustrator William Steig simply called “Shrek!”; a fractured fairytale where a fire-breathing ogre was the hero, a donkey was his noble steed, and his happily ever after is defeating a valiant knight and marrying a princess even uglier than he is. He took one look at it, saw how it turned the traditional Disney-style fantasy he helped re-popularize in the 90’s on its head, the potential for even more slams at Disney fairytales and celebrity voice casting that worked gangbusters with Aladdin and had this to say:

Shrek evolved far beyond its humble literary origins into a green middle finger pointed at Katzenberg’s former workplace, and audiences and critics ate it up because nobody had dared to do such a thing before. And I’m not gonna lie, I loved this movie when I was a kid. But over time, mostly thanks to Katzenberg’s penchant for quantity over quality, Shrek became the very thing it was parodying: a shallow, over-hyped, over-marketed fairytale cash grab, and it’s affected my view of the original installment somewhat.

Well, it’s time for this non-star to get my game on and hopefully get paid. Let’s look at Dreamworks’ watershed studio-defining blockbuster…Shrek.

November/April Review: The Prince of Egypt (1998)

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aaron, all i ever wanted, animated, brenda chapman, danny glover, Dreamworks, egypt, exodus, hans zimmer, helen mirren, jeff goldblum, jeffrey katzenberg, let my people go, martin short, michelle pfieffer, miriam, moses, musical, patrick stewart, pharaoh, playing with the big boys, prince of egypt, ralph fiennes, ramses, river lullaby, sandra bullock, stephen schwartz, steve martin, steven spielburg, the plagues, the ten commandments, tzipporah, val kilmer, when you believe

“I have seen the oppression of my people in Egypt, and I have heard their cry […] And so unto Pharaoh, I shall send…you.”
– The Burning Bush

Over two years ago I talked about Dreamworks and their unfortunate habit of leaning on the Shrek-style bandwagon (which they themselves have to blame for creating in the first place) and how every once in a while it’s balanced out by a work of jaw-dropping animation and drama that pushes the boundaries of film in a way only Pixar, Disney, and the occasional Don Bluth film have succeeded. It’s been like this since Dreamworks’ inception. “The Prince of Egypt”, today’s film, was the second animated film released after their first, “Antz”, a fairly obvious attempt to copy Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life”, premiered that same year. Ask animation buffs which is the better film and you’ll immediately be directed to this one. It’s unusual that an animation studio that just got off the ground would try something like a musical remake of “The Ten Commandments”, but hey, some ideas can sound silly on paper and yet blow everyone away in practice. “The Prince of Egypt” is without a doubt one of those films. Fostered by both Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, directed by Brenda Chapman, with songs by Stephen Schwartz of Wicked and Pippin fame and music by pre-BWOOOOOMP-obsessed Hans Zimmer, it’s a movie that at times even manages to bring the great Cecil B. Demille epic to its knees.

Now unlike certain people who shall remain nameless, I have a deep respect for those of different cultures and religions. While this movie is based on a sacred text to many, it is in no way a direct take on said text, and any jokes I make toward the holy figures depicted are not a rip on the figures themselves, just the characters as they are in the movie. The movie opens with a similar disclaimer in case you’re worried they’ll be insensitive to anyone (frankly I think the filmmakers were more terrified of offending anyone religious than any audience member who went to see this).

In other words, “Just repeat to yourselves ‘It’s just a film, I should really just relax.'”

December Review: Rise of the Guardians (2012)

(DISCLAIMER: This blog is not for profit. All images and footage used below are property of their respective companies unless stated otherwise. I do not claim ownership of this material.)

“My name is Jack Frost and I’m a Guardian. How do I know that? Because the moon told me so.”

-Jack Frost

Dreamworks – what can you say about them? They’re powerful rivals to Disney and Pixar but I almost never hear anyone say they come close to what those studios produce on a regular basis. I have a theory about this.

You see, one of Dreamworks’ founders was Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former head of animation at Disney and one of the men behind the Renaissance period in the late 80’s-early 90’s. I’m not going to go into why he left or the studio politics at the time of his departure because it’s way too long and complicated, but the point is after leaving Disney, Katzenberg wanted to create an animation studio that could compete with them and produce the stories that Disney couldn’t touch, movies that could be identified as nothing else but Dreamworks. It took them quite a while to find the perfect Dreamworks formula and in that time between its foundation and when they did discover it, they weren’t afraid to experiment. The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado are gorgeously animated masterworks, and while the timing of Antz’ release is a little too coincidental with the release of A Bug’s Life, I’d say Chicken Run more than makes up for it with its cheeky humor and creativity (though I tend to consider it more of an Aardman film than a Dreamworks film).

Then along came Shrek in 2001. It was a hit with audiences and critics, became the first Best Animated Feature Oscar winner, inspired dozens of truly horrifying memes, and in the words of Katzenberg himself, was what a Dreamworks movie could and should be.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Shrek, I truly do, but now that I’m older I can see how much I was manipulated as a kid into liking it by the barrage of marketing showing how edgy it was compared to Disney fare at the time. Speaking of Disney, if you know anything about Katzenberg’s feelings towards the company (especially its then-CEO Michael Eisner), the movie takes on a more unpleasant tone, like Katzenberg is flipping a huge middle finger towards the studio that got him to where he is in the first place throughout. The sequels and spinoffs may have made the Shrek franchise inescapable for a while, but they’ve mostly aged better than the first film has. Shrek 2 handled the modern-day/Disney fairytale parody much better in my opinion, and the musical version manages to give the characters much more heart and development* (every horrible thing you’ve heard about Shrek the Third is true though; for the love of all that is good and holy avoid it like the plague).

Getting back on topic, watch this or any random Dreamworks movie that came afterward and you can bet that all of these rules that go into making it will come into play –

1. Assemble a cast of celebrities (voice acting experience not required; the bigger names the better regardless of whether or not they act at all)
2. Infuse your soundtrack with pop songs with one classic hit as your main theme that will be played ad nauseum (Hans Zimmer or Harry Gregson-Williams must also provide the score)
3. Make as many references pertaining to what’s popular right now or within the past few years. The more the better, especially if they go completely over young kids’ heads
4. Your hero must be a totally hip dude who’s always with it but nobody ever gives a chance or an average joe that everyone puts down because he’s really a special snowflake
5. End every movie with a dance party
6. END EVERY MOVIE WITH A DANCE PARTY

It’s catering to a formula like this that makes me worry that this is why people are more ready to consider animation a distraction for children rather than an art form. Rather than present something with a long shelf-life that everyone can enjoy regardless of age, it chooses to focus on what will make them the most money now by playing to the lowest common denominator with juvenile humor and references that nobody will understand or find funny even five years from its release. When this formula worked with Shrek, everyone tried to copy it, even Disney. By now it’s been used so many times I’m surprised it hasn’t made the studio collapse on itself (though it has come close several times).

My theory is this – for every couple of films that follows the Dreamworks formula or is a sequel to one of them, there is one that manages to capture that era of beauty that first helped get the studio off the ground and succeeds in balancing it out. More often than not it can put a spin on that formula to make it work in a non-manipulative way. Kung-Fu Panda looked like an ordinary Dreamworks film but evolved into something creative and funny and genuinely beautiful. How to Train Your Dragon was the same (something they both have in common is that their second movies manage to blow the first out of the water and I’m scared to death that the upcoming third installations in their franchises will be a repeat of Shrek the Third). Rise of the Guardians is among those rare and wonderful films.

Based on the Guardians of Childhood series of books by William Joyce (better known as the creator of Rollie Pollie Ollie and The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore), this movie is as far from traditional Dreamworks as you can get…but there’s also no other way to describe it but Dreamworks. Its look is unlike any other in the usual style, the story is very inventive, the lore is fascinating, the emotional stakes are high, and having it produced by Guillermo del Toro certainly gives it a lot of credit as well (now if only he would get around to doing Hellboy 3).

Unfortunately, stunning visuals and creative story doesn’t always guarantee a box office smash. Lots of films hinge on good marketing or word of mouth to sell them and sadly this film had neither. There were a few fans, but not enough to save it. It also came out at the perfect time – holiday season 2012 – but it ended up getting swept under the rug and was considered a bomb by Dreamworks. As a result, the executives were forced to start handing out pink slips to many talented artists and had to go back to that always reliable Dreamworks formula to save them from bankruptcy.

To put it in perspective, Rise of the Guardians made $306,941,670 domestically. Turbo, made $282,500,000 worldwide, but Katzenburg also gave it a Netflix series to squeeze even more potential revenue from it (and people wonder why I’m so determined to drive snails to the endangered species list).

So is this movie really the big bomb the studio who made it wrote it off as? Let’s take a look.