A violation of animation's sacred rivalry

I don't know a lot of things these days about the behind-the-scenes movements in the film industry -- in part because I don't try to keep up with/understand all the various takeovers and new conglomerates -- but I thought I knew this:

Disney is Disney and Dreamworks is Dreamworks and never the twain shall meet.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I logged into Disney+ yesterday, and one of the first things greeting me was an image of Shrek in the eponymous film.

Shrek, the movie, is in many ways the flagship product of Dreamworks Animation. It was only the sixth of an eventual 53 feature features (and counting), but it's got the most direct sequels of any Dreamworks series (three, with one more on the way) and it represents the moment the studio really announced itself as a player, not having quite gotten there with films like Antz, The Road to El Dorado and The Prince of Egypt. 

Since then, Dreamworks has positioned itself as the primary alternative to Disney in the animation realm. If for some reason you didn't like Disney -- and yes, I suppose there are people out there who do prefer Dreamworks, including, so he says, my younger son -- then Dreamworks would be giving you movies that looked almost as good with almost as good voice talent and, well, far worse writing if you ask me. 

As you will see in any good rivalry, Dreamworks heavily borrows from Disney when it can, and the reverse is sometimes true. I'm sorry to say that Disney has begun more often using the sickly pinks and purples I railed about in this post, which I considered a Dreamworks staple. 

So why the hell is the Dreamworks flagship product now available on the streaming service of its chief rival? What gives?

I tried to see if this was a general availability of Dreamworks stuff on Disney, but as I searched for a number of the other high-profile Dreamworks properties -- such as Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar -- I found nary a trace of them. I tried a handful of other titles just for good measure before stopping. I'm not going to try 53 titles.

There is clearly some kind of licensing exception going on here, and that's another thing I don't pretend to understand, nor do I really want to understand any better. Because it's not actually all the Shrek movies that are available on Disney+, just the first three. Shrek Forever After (2010) is not there.

AI slop to the rescue!

Here's what AI tells me about this, in an unusual brief answer to the question:

Shrek, Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third are now streaming on Disney+. To all who are confused, this is because of a licensing deal between Hulu and DreamWorks. But Shrek is from Dreamworks? David Frantsen licensing deal.

I love that this answer just loses all pretenses to grammar at the end.

So that was actually my thought, that it had something to do with Hulu, which is part of Disney+ at least here in Australia, and maybe only here in Australia. Like I said, I don't try to understand these things.

I do still find it very weird, and it also seems like we're one step closer to everything just being owned by one company. I'm finding this whole Netflix/Warner Brothers situation fairly ominous in that regard, again without really digging into it. I just know it was very expensive and there's a lot of hand wringing about it.

For now, at least I have easy access to finally watch the second and third Shrek movie if I want. That's right! I've only seen the original! 

At the time Shrek came out, I thought I liked it quite a bit. It was very early on in the new age of animation and I had a basic awe of what it accomplished. But by the time I saw part of it again later on that year on the plane, I had turned against it. The whole five-minute argument about whether onions had layers or not -- really, listen to that scene, it goes on forever -- may have been the thing that did it, but it was really just emblemetic of larger issues. I never thought it was necessary to watch another one, which tells you something about what I think of Dreamworks in general: I never even wanted to watch any of the sequels to their flagship product.

I just checked back in my rankings for 2001 and I had it ranked 53rd out of 73. Not great. 

However, now that Disney has brought it into the fold, maybe I need to reconsider! 

Animated colors that nauseate me

After all the to-ing and fro-ing about no one in my family wanting to see The Croods: A New Age (including me, I should say, but I would have gone in order to visit the little town theater in Mansfield, where we stayed between Christmas and New Year's), my wife ended up taking both my kids on Monday, the hottest day of the year so far and one of the last before they return to school tomorrow.

They liked it, of course. I'd say perhaps my wife especially, except that the younger one declared it one of the best movies he'd ever seen. The older one, the one more prone to movie-related hyberole (declaring a half-dozen movies the best he'd ever seen in the past year alone), said it was "okay" but then immediately upgraded that to "pretty good," as you could see him thinking he had been uncharitable, and trying to reconcile his disinterest in seeing it with the fact he'd actually liked it.

It got me thinking about my own negative preconceived notions about the movie that prevented me from wanting to see it, and it's put me on to a larger theory of why I do or do not anticipate certain animated movies. It's a phenomenon common to second-banana animated studios like Dreamworks and Sony, and has to do with the color palettes.

Simply put, when was the last time you saw these colors in a Disney or Pixar movie?

Answer: Never, because Disney and Pixar intuitively realize there's something unpleasant about those pinks and purples, especially when mashed up next to each other.

Oh, Pixar used pinks and purples in Soul, but please note the difference in shade:

Those are lighter, friendlier, more digestible pinks and purples. They don't slap you in the face like those colors used in Dreamworks' The Croods: A New Age or Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, the two images selected above.

I think it was the latter movie, which I really despised after loving the original, that first planted the seed of these pinks and purples nauseating me. My memory of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is that every scene is a gross mishmash of these colors, assaulting my corneas and turning my stomach in a metaphorical if not literal way. 

Sure, it's easy to find these pinks and purples in one shot of The Croods. But is that all you got, Vance?

Nope.

I better stop posting these images or I just might vomit.

Yes, I do find these colors displeasing, but this is not just me hating on pink and purple. You can do pink and purple right. It's the aggressive pink and purple, almost neon in its intensity, that makes me feel assaulted. 

It's a whole aesthetic approach to this and a number of other of what I would consider lesser animated films. These colors are prevalent in the Trolls movies as well, for example. And the thing that really sticks out about them is the extent to which they don't exist in nature. Yes, there are pinks and purples in nature, but not these pinks and purples.

See that sloth in the picture above? That sloth is pink. Have you ever seen a pink sloth in nature?

Now, the evidence of The Croods: A New Age -- as least as far as my family's opinons constitute evidence -- demonstrates that this color scheme is not fatal to the effectiveness of the movie. And my wife usually hates pink, like with a passion. She wasn't bothered by it here, which just goes to show you how caught up she was in the story. She really appreciated the female empowerment message of it.

But it's going to keep people like me away, unable to experience that storytelling for ourselves. And it's not because I'm a boy and I don't like pink. It's because something about that mashup of pink and purple has the effect on me that a strobe light has on an epileptic. 

You're stealing everything else from Disney -- or trying to, anyway -- so take a lesson from them and figure out how to employ a more muted color palette. 

The good, the bad and the really bad

I've decided my eight-year-old son is my animation polar opposite.

When we were trying to pick out a movie on Friday night for movie night, it was his younger brother's turn to pick. Of course, the older one never misses an opportunity to try to influence a situation with his words. (Shrewdly, if successful, this would get him two picks in a row, as this would technically be his brother's choice.)

"I'd watch anything Madagascar," he said to his brother. "Anything Madagascar is good."

This is a guy who, just moments earlier, turned his nose up, with prejudice, at The Lion King -- a movie with a lot of the same subject matter, only good. As I've told you before, he also claims to hate Toy Story and Finding Nemo, though I was at least encouraged that it was the younger one who vetoed Wall-E, which the older one would have been willing to watch.

Still, as a general principle, the eight-year-old seems to be Team Dreamworks while I am Team Disney/Pixar.

Sigh.

It's not that I don't like any Dreamworks films, because that's certainly not the case. However, my typical relationship with Dreamworks is to see the first in every series of films and leave their umpteen sequels unwatched. Even the good ones, like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. (Actually, I saw the second How to Train Your Dragon but not yet the third.) To be fair, I may be conflating multiple different non-Disney/Pixar animation studios here, as the prime example of this is Ice Age, which is Blue Sky, not Dreamworks.

The original Madagascar had been the poster boy for what I think Dreamworks does wrong with its movies. Too manic, too many characters getting hit in the head by falling objects. You don't need me to elaborate. You've seen these movies.

Anyway, I greatly disliked Madagascar and make a habit of commenting on my dislike for it whenever it comes up in conversation. I wear that dislike almost as a badge of honor.

Over the years, though, people I trust have diminished some of my bluster about Madagascar. Having liked the first movie well enough, they shouldn't have held any sway over me at all. But these are people whose tastes are otherwise trustworthy, and they seem to have an especial fondness for Madagascar 3, the one with the circus afros. Which, by the way, is not a good standout detail to know about a movie.

On Friday night, I felt like it was maybe time to give the Madagascar series another shot, so indeed, we queued up Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. (Wait, isn't Madagascar the country actually in Africa? Or off its coast anyway?)

Ugh.

Instead of rejuvenating the potential of the series, the second Madagascar killed it dead where it stood. I didn't figure it was possible to like it less than I liked Madagascar, but that sure was the case. The vocal performances are annoying (a big complaint I had with the first), the jokes are unfunny, the heartwarming storylines are utterly perfunctory, and the hitting on the head is plentiful, at least metaphorically if not actually.

Consulting Letterboxd, I see I gave the original two stars out of five, at least as a retroactive assessment of my feelings toward it when I started on Letterboxd in early 2012. The sequel? I gave it only half that, making it the rare animated movie to get only a single star from me. (Off the top of my head, I can think of only two others: All Dogs Go to Heaven and The Nut Job.)

I'm not going to further deconstruct my dislike for Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, but I did want to give one more thing that I think is dumb about it: It has way too many silly side characters. Following in Despicable Me's footsteps -- or is it the other way around? -- these movies have their minions in the form of the penguins. However, then they also have King Julien and his sidekick. And there are also two posh monkeys who are like Statler and Waldorf on the Muppets. Predictably, it's way too much.

I also wanted to explain the meaning of my subject for this post, because there was a funny coincidence to this viewing.

As you will recall, I only just watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for the first time on Wednesday night. I watched Moneyball in between, but Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa made for the second consecutive new-to-me movie featuring Ennio Morricone's iconic theme song from the Leone western.

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" -- also the name of the song -- plays a couple times during the film, whenever this elderly New York tourist on safari shows up on screen. See, in typical Dreamworks fashion, she's a fightin' granny who tussles with Alex, the lion voiced by Ben Stiller. As the music reminds us of a much, much, much, much, much, much (catch your breath) much better movie, she delivers roundhouse kicks to Alex and says "Bad kitty."

Really bad indeed.

Credit where credit is due

I've been a little hard on Dreamworks over the years on this blog. You might say that I look for opportunities to get in little digs at the world's second most successful animation studio.

In fact, you might even say that I was mentally composing a blog post entitled "The Pepsi of animation" when I first arrived at Dreamworks Animation: The Exhibit in Melbourne's Federation Square this past Sunday with my wife and two kids in tow. You might say this was the result of quickly scanning the walls and realizing that you know what? I don't really love any of these characters. You might say that.

But you might also say that I give credit where credit is due.

Even if I don't love all the characters or even most of the movies they appear in, I do love the commitment Dreamworks brought to giving us a truly interactive experience that brings us inside the world of making their particular brand of movie magic.

For a reasonable price of $22.50 per adult -- a price that seemed even more reasonable because we had one free ticket -- you're exposed to a gallery of pictures, movie clips, sculptures, models, how-to videos, touchscreens, dioramas and everything else you can imagine that basically charts the history of Dreamworks Animation. (With a few exceptions that I'll get to later.) The gallery is designed in three conceptual areas -- Character, Story and World -- and laid out in such a way to take you kind of chronologically through the creation process.

Highlights:

- A wall devoted to demonstrating the storyboarding stage. The wall is filled with index-card sized images depicting the Gingerbread Man torture scene from Shrek, with the hundred or so in the middle blank. Then a projector projects the image of a Dreamworks creative mind stepping through additional index card-sized images projected on to the blanks on the wall, creating the illusion of a complete storyboarding wall -- the man does the character voices and steps through the scene with a pointer. Then near the end we see the actual scene play out in the movie.

- A brainstorming session, which shows a table covered with notepads, scripts, discarded food containers, a large paper scroll, cell phones, and any number of other pieces of creative detritus. A projector factors in here as well, but it's projecting down from the ceiling, allowing images to appear and race across the notebooks, character faces to be scribbled on otherwise blank sticky notes, pages flipping in a book, and even a yellow highlighter magically coloring lines of dialogue in the script. Exceedingly well done.

- A wall devoted to showing the modern adaptation of Mr. Peabody and Sherman next to the source material from the 1960s. The Leonardo Da Vinci sequence was actually based on a sequence form the show, and it was a real education on the evolution of animation to see the final product next to its inspiration.

- A "drawing room" where you can experiment with the desktop software technology Dreamworks animators use. As this was intended for ages 6 and up and there was a long line, I am kind of making the assumption it would have been a highlight if we could have seen it.

- And last but the opposite of least, a circular theater that shows a four-minute virtual journey on board the back of the dragon from How to Train Your Dragon (and its sequel), which swoops through the island of Berk as it is created before our eyes. Starting with just a charcoal drawing of the dragon, "you" (as in the camera's eye) get on his back as he becomes a full-fledged creature, flying through an island environment that builds itself from its digital endoskeleton into the fully realized world you see in the movie. Although this trip made my wife a little sick, it dropped my jaw in wonder. I watched the movie twice.

Then there are just a ton of animation stills and walls devoted to particular films, sometimes with video monitors and talking heads explaining some key element of the creative process.

Dreamworks' movies mostly received some form of representation, even obscurer choices like Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. It surprised me to be reminded that Antz was actually the studio's first film, which meant that it positioned itself as an alternative to Pixar before going back and doing some more traditional 2D animation (like The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado and the two titles mentioned above). There were a few notable exceptions, however -- last year's hit Turbo was almost nowhere to be seen, and one of my favorite Dreamworks movies, Monsters vs. Aliens, was also absent. A couple of the sequels also didn't appear. While this did strike me with an instinct to nitpick, I guess it's also representative of just how much Dreamworks has actually outputted in the past 16 years.

As with any exhibit we attend with children, we didn't get to do or take in as much as we would have wanted before we left. But I commented to my wife that the virtual dragon ride was worth the price of admission alone. Having been queasy during it, I don't suppose she exactly agreed.

My quibbles with Dreamworks have rarely been with the actual animation, but more with the writing. I have always said that they just don't get the same quality writers as Disney/Pixar. Although Dreamworks might take this as less of an affront than if I said the reverse, that the animation looked shoddy, I suppose it's also a point of pride for them to have created characters and stories that have become beloved. Making something look good is one thing, but making us care intensely about that nice-looking this is the arguably harder task.

Looking at the body of work together, though, I did allow myself to get momentarily swept up in what Dreamworks has accomplished, and it made me eager to go back and watch a few of the films I haven't seen. They did a really good job with this exhibit and I am convinced that their catalogue is something to be genuinely proud of.

Yeah, they may be the Pepsi of animation. But when you're in a Pepsi mood, Pepsi can hit the spot.

Distant past, distant future

I just finished watching The Croods, the latest Dreamworks movie to not be as good as I think it should be, though still good enough to tug at my heartstrings a little bit.

I went to add another three-star entry for an animated movie in Letterboxd when I discovered that I could actually add either The Croods or The Croods 2.

As I have discussed before, Letterboxd is again catering its services to time travelers.

In my previous post on the subject, I talked about how the site's open-ended date field allows you to go back to -- well, to the era the Croods actually lived to say you watched The Croods. I gave up going backwards around 400 or 500 B.C., anyway.

Now, it's the site allowing me to say I've seen a movie that won't even be released for another six years.

That's right, The Croods 2 is listed on Letterboxd as a 2019 release. 

It's admirable, if you are a movie website, to get your database ready to go as early as possible, so you are right on top of things when a movie starts being shown in advanced screenings and film festivals and the like. Someone can legitimately say they've seen one of those movies a year or even two years before its general release.

The Croods 2? I'm sure they are only just starting to work on the script.

There are two things I find funny about it already being a database entry in Letterboxd. One is that they added it. The other is that Dreamworks has already both settled on, and publicized, a 2019 release date. I don't know of any other movie whose release date is projected so far in the future.

How hard can it really be to make a Croods sequel, that they'll let the iron get that cold before finishing the movie? I guess it's not that the movie would take that long to make, if that were the only thing they were working on. Rather, it's probably that the pipeline is so full of other middling Dreamworks crap that 2019 is the first vacant slot on the schedule.

From the perspective of Letterboxd, can't someone just set up a calendar reminder on their computer to add it to the database sometime in, I don't know, late 2017? Because now it's one of those things that just makes the site look silly. If I say that I've already watched The Croods 2, then it will appear to my Letterboxd friends as recent activity on my part. They'll wonder how I've already seen this movie that is probably only just being storyboarded, if that. Or more likely, they will just immediately know it's a mistake on the site, something that should have been locked down but wasn't.

Of course, my own Letterboxd diary is so sacrosanct that I can't actually punk them by saying I've watched The Croods 2. I've got my standards ... even if they don't.

Dreamworks' inadvertent rival pimping

This is the story of how my son's interest in watching Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit always ends in a viewing of Toy Story.

My son is allowed to watch as much as two hours worth of TV when he wakes up on weekend mornings. Scoff all you want, fellow parents. Deep down, you know you treasure those two hours as an invaluable time to do things around the house. (Even if the things you're doing are not very meritorious, such as updating your blog.)

So each morning after I get him up, we go through an often-circuitous rigmarole about what he wants to watch. This process is complicated by the fact that he sometimes doesn't know the name of the thing he wants to watch. Often I use our Recently Watched section of Netflix streaming as a major crutch, and many mornings, we fill these two hours by stringing together a number of half-hour shows.

However, a feature also does the trick of getting us most of the way there. This is where it gets a little tricky. When he's requesting Cars, does he want to watch so-called "Fin Cars" ("Different Cars"), a series of tall tales told by Mater, which runs 36 minutes? Or is he talking about the two-hour feature, which we just bought about a month ago?

Another area of ambiguity relates to Wallace & Gromit. The short films (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave) used to be available for streaming in a package. I don't think they are anymore, so when W&G get requested nowadays -- as they did this morning -- I put in our DVD of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

And then usually take it right out again.

See, something about seeing the Dreamworks logo come up makes my son want to watch Toy Story instead.

I had no idea what it was until this morning, when the phenomenon happened again.

"Ina watch Toy Story," he said in that tone of voice that's almost a whine, but not quite, as those balloons float up into the clouds, and the boy starts fishing on that crescent moon.

This morning I tried to take note of what is causing this association in my son, and it occurred to me pretty quickly once the Toy Story BluRay had gone in.

See, the opening screen of the BluRay, where they ask you your preferred language for the disc options, is Andy's wallpaper -- which happens to be a big screen of blue broken up by regular intervals of clouds.

Bingo.

You know, Dreamworks' is probably screwed no matter what it does. I'm kind of surprised the Dreamworks logo doesn't make my son want to watch a different Pixar movie, Up, which we also own. After all, the logo prominently features balloons as well.

Then again, it's very unlikely that my son knows the title Up. It's a bit abstract for a child. When he does request it -- which is rare -- I believe he refers to it as "Balloons." Or "buyoons," which is how he pronounces it. (My son is learning Spanish at daycare, and may have heard that word spoken with the Spanish convention of turning double L's into a Y sound.)

Of course, if we're talking patterns, here's another predictable one that also relates to my son changing his viewing preferences based on a visual trigger:

Once he's set up with his viewing option, I like to set myself up with my laptop at our kitchen table, which looks in on the living room where he's watching his shows. If I can see him, he can see me, and my laptop immediately reminds him of his absolute favorite viewing option:

"Diggers."

"Daddy, ina watch diggers," he says/whines.

See, before we showed him any TV, we allowed him to watch construction equipment ("diggers") on youtube on my computer. In time, "diggers" came to refer to anything watched on the internet on daddy's computer -- trains, helicopters, even shows on potty training. Although TV is now an option for him and has been for almost a year, "diggers" has never been fully supplanted.

And more often than not, when I've got my computer out, my son will slink over and try to start climbing up on my knee, and begin full-on whining if he is even remotely denied.

So here's another skill parents have gotten down: adaptation. Now, I bring my work computer home every weekend, so he can watch diggers on my work computer, while I use this one to write this post, the one I'm finishing right about ...

... now.

It's all in the writing

There are others in the game, but it's safe to say that the two current titans in animation are Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks. We can lump Disney and Pixar together because a) Disney owns Pixar, and b) when combined, their output about equals that of Dreamworks.

(Sorry, Universal/Illumination Entertainment -- I'm not inviting you to this party for the disappointing Despicable Me and Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. I'll also now make a dutiful mention of Fox' Ice Age movies.)

Although I certainly prefer the animation styles of Disney/Pixar, I'm not going to credit them with having a significant technical advantage over Dreamworks in that department.

And so, when/if Dreamworks does poach employees from Disney/Pixar, they shouldn't be poaching the animators. They should be poaching the writers.

The writing is why Dreamworks is Pepsi to Disney/Pixar's Coke.

The latest example is Rise of the Guardians, the movie I accidentally saw on Thursday night. I had gone to the Sherman Oaks Arclight for an 8:00 showing of Lincoln, but was denied as the result of an apparent sell-out. Although the "big board" did not list the movie as sold out, neither could I purchase a ticket to it at one of the kiosks. And I was close enough to start time not be able to wait behind over 20 dodos who didn't realize you can also buy tickets from the machines. Even if I did, the wait might only confirm what I already suspected about the paucity of available tickets.

Since it started only five minutes later, Rise of the Guardians was an obvious Plan B. (Though I first made sure that Anna Karenina wasn't playing anytime soon.)

My response to this movie was sluggish from the start. That's not to say I thought it was poorly made. As I said before, I prefer the character designs in Disney and Pixar, but I could easily recognize the virtuoso work on display here. I just wish it weren't so manically dizzying, is all. So frantic with color and action and general zaniness. "You can tell they worked really hard on this" was the backhanded compliment that kept occurring to me.

It was really the writing that let me down. The inability to make me care about the characters. The inability to give them depth. The inability to fill me with wonder. The inability to make me laugh.

That was the thing that surprised me most about Wreck-It Ralph, which I saw a couple weeks ago. Not surprised that I cared about the characters or was infected with the contagious sense of wonder, but that I was laughing hysterically. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that the movie was perfectly tailored for a child of the 1980s to get its references, but Wreck-It Ralph may have been the hardest I've laughed at a movie this year. (I'll also note that I saw it with two friends who are the same age and have the same references, which certainly helped.)

I didn't laugh once during Rise of the Guardians. Not once.

I might consider Wreck-It Ralph an anomaly if not for the fact that Disney's previous non-Pixar animated release, Tangled, gave me the hardest single laugh I can remember having in the theater. That's a bold statement, but it may be true. I distinguish this hard laugh from other hard laughs because I kept giggling about this particular line of dialogue for minutes afterward. If you've seen the movie, it's when the thief turned hero, Flynn (voice of Zachary Levi), finds himself in an improbable sword fight with a horse, backing up toward the edge of a long dropoff. Yelling above the ruckus, Flynn tells the horse (who, true to nature, can't speak), "Just so you know, this is the strangest thing I've ever done." I'm almost starting to laugh now, just typing this out.

As a comparison, let's look at the other recent Dreamworks movies that didn't make me laugh: How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda ... well, maybe once or twice each. I did laugh at Monsters vs. Aliens, but that stands out as an exception that I attribute more to the vocal actors than the writing. I'd say its third act gives a good idea of its structural failures from a script perspective.

Why are there so many recent Dreamworks Animation movies I'm not even mentioning here? Because I didn't even deem them worth seeing. That list includes the last two Madagascar movies, the second Kung Fu Panda, the last three Shrek movies, Puss in Boots and Megamind. I did really enjoy Bee Movie back in 2007, but had a much more negative impression of it on second viewing. (That also probably speaks to the writing, as that script is all over the place.)

Pure Pepsi, I tell you.

Now, I haven't seen Pixar's last two movies, either. But I do expect to catch Brave in the coming weeks. I'm probably saving Cars 2 for when my son inevitably goes crazy over the Cars movies, which will happen just as soon as we expose him to the first one.

I do realize that the claims I'm making here are rather broad. In fact, if I looked up these movies, I'm sure I'd find their scripts credited to dozens of different writers, multiple per movie in most cases. Naturally, a group of dozens of different writers have varying strengths that should seem to operate independently of whatever studio is employing them.

Except Pixar and the last two Disney films do have a certain unifying force that gives them a consistent quality: John Lasseter. You know, the guy who basically founded Pixar and directed the first two Toy Story movies. (We won't mentioned that he also directed what many people considered three of the lesser Pixar movies, A Bug's Life and the two Cars movies. For the record, I do really like the original Cars.)

I can't be sure to what extent Lasseter meddles in the day-to-day operations of these movies, but I have to think that his fingerprints are all over Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph, which certainly qualifies as a good thing. In fact, it seems as though he's putting more of himself into making really good Disney movies than really good Pixar movies, as Brave seems likely to be the second straight Pixar movie not to win the Oscar for best animated feature. (If you were asking me today, I'd bet on Wreck-It Ralph to win this year.)

Assuming that he does meddle (and that this is a good thing), it's probably not standing over the shoulder of an animator, grabbing his mouse arm and operating the animator like a puppet, showing him the right way to give texture to individual hairs on a character's head. Nope, I'm thinking he's in the writer's room, figuring out just the right way to give the characters texture, dimension and heart.

The results speak for themselves. Disney/Pixar movies feature characters and scenarios you care about, which lead to exciting and poignant narrative climaxes.

Dreamworks?

With Rise of the Guardians being a particularly valid example, Dreamworks movies are just a big light show.