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.

But here's something really weird. I just went to check how I'd ranked it in my 2001 rankings, and you know what? It's not there!

I absoutely did see Shrek in the theater, and I believe the partial plane viewing was, indeed, later that same year. So not only did I definitely see it, but I saw it about 1.5 times. Yet it's missing from my rankings. 

This is the first time in my history of ranking films that I've noticed that I missed ranking a film that was eligible to be ranked that year. I'm not going to say it's never happened before, I'm just saying I've never noticed it.

I guess Shrek is proving to be an exception in multiple ways here.