Will Disney buy DWA? No! Universal did!

[ShyViolet]

Ten best DWA films:

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/10-Best- ... 09297.html

[Dan]

A subjective list to be sure as I doubt a lot of people would agree with it (as can be seen in the comments section) outside of How to Train Your Dragon being at the top (or at least near it for some). Right off the bat to have the first Shrek at No. 10 meant I wasn't going to agree with the list, even more so when they put Shrek 2 higher. But then that's just me.

[Ben]

Yeah...can't take that list seriously. I mean, I do probably prefer the second Shrek to the first, and nice to see El Dorado get some love, but a top ten DWA list that doesn't have Prince Of Egypt in its top ten? Phooey!

[ShyViolet]

My list:

1. Kung Fu Panda
2. How to Train Your Dragon
3. Prince of Egypt
4. Chicken Run
3. How to train your Dragon 2
4. Kung Fu Panda 2
5. Shrek Forever After
6. Shrek 2
7. Rise of the Guardians
8. Flushed Away
9. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
10.Monsters vs. Aliens
11. Madagascar
12. Sinbad
13. SharkTale
14. Road to El Dorado
15. Shrek*
16. Shrek the Third


* I still really like it. But its flaws stand out to me much more now.

[Dacey]

Maybe my memory is messing with me? For whatever reason I thought Vi loved Shrek but didn't care much for PoE?

[ShyViolet]

Prince of Egypt was my number 1 DWA film for a long time...I still love it, but, as I said with Shrek, I see its flaws a lot more clearly now. (So serious the humor seems extremely forced. Too short. Barely any mention of the actual Ten Commandments. Not enough Miriam and Aaron, no Golden Calf or any desert stuff. Also too much focus on Moses and not enough on, well, God. (God brought the Hebrews out of Egypt, not Moses.)

I've loved Shrek for a long, long time and always will, but the film's constant need to skewer fairy tales often seems to take precedence over developing the characters. (And the inherent bitterness of the film, which of course goes back to JK. I could also have done with less of the scatalogical stuff too.)

[Ben]

Awe...no Over The Hedge or Megamind...!?

[ShyViolet]

Whoops! I knew I forgot something! Love both those films!! . I'd put Over the Hedge right below Shrek Forever after, and Megamind right after.

[Dan]

I must say that this conversation has me thinking of doing a run of all the DWA films, similar to what I did 15 years ago where I watched all the canon Disney animated features at the time in order (We're talking from Snow White to Atlantis and before Dinosaur was considered canon).

[Dacey]

You mean back when Atlantis was "number 40"? We actually did that at my house, too, before the movie came out (although we didn't include the "package films" because we didn't own them). We would later do a "full" marathon with all 50 films following the release of Tangled.

[Dan]

Yep. The Atlantis DVD had just come out and I was living in Pennsylvania at the time. I got a day or two off because of snow so I spent three days straight watching the films.

Now I'm really interested in doing this for DWA.

Of the 32 films (if you discount Joseph: King of Dreams since that's a DTV), I personally own 20. There are 3 others that I can stream on Netflix (if I can verify, maybe 4) and KFP 3 just came out in theaters, leaving me with having to rent or buy the others.

[Randall]

I'd also place POE near the top, so double phooey on this list. Nice to see Aardman and El Dorado got some love, though.

Guardians and Peabody in the top 4? Well, everyone has an opinion...

[Ben]

Awe, no Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, Vi...!?

I think I have all the DWA films on disc (either DVD for the earlier ones, BD for the later ones) and a marathon would be interesting, although the issue of context comes into play. The studio has been inconsistent with its approach (from tradigital to CG, with Aardman - do you include these films? - kind of thrown in the middle) and there isn't the same kind of process or development that you have with Disney's 50+ films, mainly because we got those over a 80 year period and it's interesting and cool to note the changes in filmgoing tastes and world history as the films change and reflect this.

With DWA they've packed so many titles into such a short space that I certainly wouldn't get the same kind of nourishment out of a marathon. In fact I'd be more tempted to watch them in groups rather than chronological, which is kind of meaningless. So I'd have the tradigital films and note how they got better visually but less creatively, then probably go for all the Shreks, the Madagascars and Penguins, and the Pandas, then go back and see the real development between the stand-alones from Antz and probably end with the one-two punch of the two Dragon films.

This last bunch would really be the best run, where it would appear DWA went from being a follower of the then-slim pack that still had its own smart voice (Antz), through going through highs and lows and back on top with the emotional and creative resonance of the Dragons. I just don't think you would get that in doing a purely chronological run, since it would keep being like resetting to square one with all the sequels they have done.

That's how I would probably do it, anyhow, although I would leave King Of Dreams out. It's not a "real" DWA project anyway, and went straight to DVD as mentioned. I don't own it either (although it's on Netflix at the moment) - in fact it's one of the really rare titles that I took back to the store on the basis of it just being so terrible, along with Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command! Both were so disappointing in that age before we got used to being disappointed with the DTVs that my importer dude took pity and actually swapped them for other titles (I admit that I did spend an obscene amount of money there each month - and had done since the LaserDisc days - so they took care of me like that for many years before online ordering shut them down).

I did a Disney run in the late 1990s over about a couple of years into the early 2000s, watching with pals when we could get together and going through all the supplements, and we did a Bond run just before or after Casino Royale came out. But I'm waiting for our home theatre to be done before I get into any more prolonged movie watching!

[Dan]

There is the thought of breaking them up into groups, as you noted Ben, but if I were to do that I'd probably keep to the simple Traditional group, Aardman group, and CG group. I'm not sure I'd break the CG group any further because, although DWA has been sequel heavy, I would nonetheless still get that look of the changes and development process DWA went through from year to year as opposed to evaluating it within the Shrek group first and then moving on to the Madagascar group etc.

Kind of reminds me of their Comic Con panel in 2013, actually (which I got to go to). They were promoting Turbo (which had just come out at the time), Mr. Peabody and Sherman, and HTTYD 2, so you got this great structure of creative process and development with a completely new property then the adapting of an existing property and then the latest entry in a beloved franchise.

[EricJ]

Prince of Egypt was my number 1 DWA film for a long time...I still love it, but, as I said with Shrek, I see its flaws a lot more clearly now. (So serious the humor seems extremely forced. Too short. Barely any mention of the actual Ten Commandments. Not enough Miriam and Aaron, no Golden Calf or any desert stuff. Also too much focus on Moses and not enough on, well, God. (God brought the Hebrews out of Egypt, not Moses.)

I've loved Shrek for a long, long time and always will, but the film's constant need to skewer fairy tales often seems to take precedence over developing the characters. (And the inherent bitterness of the film, which of course goes back to JK. I could also have done with less of the scatalogical stuff too.)

Shrek's disgruntled-ex-employee stereotype of "Disney is nothing but fairytales and twittering princesses!" so predates the Lasseter Renaissance, it's almost quaint. In a historical sort of way that you look at and think, "Oh, that's what they thought back then, yeah, things were pretty bad during that long ago era..."

PoE came at the end of the 90's, just as the two things that were driving us up the wall about 90's Disney (it was Hunchback that killed off the Renaissance, not Hercules, and Pocahontas started it bleeding) was the goofy humor and the panderingly set-up one-dimensional villains. Here, to have a movie that had almost NO sense of humor, replacing it with straightforward Pixar-like earnestness, but at the same time not descend into corny Spirit-like Katzenberg melodrama, and give us a sympathetic Pharaoh who wasn't such a bad guy, but just a ruthless victim of circumstance and his own ambition and authority, was a thunderbolt. Like Dragons, it was the freak Exception to the Rule that fans singlehandedly defended the studio with for years--"Whoa, wait a minute: Somebody made this movie WITHOUT Katzenberg, they suddenly went sane! "

That puts it just over the top for best, edging out Monsters v. Aliens:
Which, like the few and far between other good CGI-era Dreamworks, gave us a protagonist we liked, who wasn't a bullied self-delusional loser who was both gag-victim and "hero", but loses a point for all the pandering "Runaway bride" crap we have to put up with before Susan becomes Ginormica, and again at the end when we need a subplot.
Ohh, after Disney-bashing female audiences were the only ones watching Shrek sequels, did Jeffrey know on which side his studio was buttered, and slather it on thick.

That's how I would probably do it, anyhow, although I would leave King Of Dreams out. It's not a "real" DWA project anyway, and went straight to DVD as mentioned. I don't own it either (although it's on Netflix at the moment) - in fact it's one of the really rare titles that I took back to the store on the basis of it just being so terrible, along with Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command!

Joseph isn't 100% good-good, but for Dreamworks, even the Spirit-era 2D Dreamworks, it isn't bad-bad:
It's a more thin story than Moses, but it shares the spirit of everything that was "right" with PoE, and the lack of everything "wrong" with their other films. While I wouldn't put it second enough to beat out MvA, it's still in the top 5.

(And you do know Buzz Lightyear was a TV pilot, don't you? Oh, the days of DTV's when we couldn't tell the difference... )