A good movie

Even though it seems to be a long time ago and most of us have forgotten about it but, at first, DreamWorks animation started out with some good old hand-drawn animation but expect for ‘ The Prince of Egypt’ which was financially and critically successful, the rest didn’t work very well and after only 4 hand-drawn features, they completely left out this medium and focused solely on CGI animation (just like Disney). Eventually, out of this 4 movies, this movie was their biggest flop ever and it has the dishonor to be the only DreamWorks Animation picture not to earn a profit at the box-office. I think it’s too bad for two reasons. First of all, this flick was actually pretty good. The animation looked really good and it was pretty neat to make a story about this subject. My guess is that even though the story was entertaining enough, it was still too pedestrian and after decades of sugarcoated Disney features, the audience want a little bit more from those stories instead of all always the same characters going through basically the same issue over and over again. I still think it ‘s a real shame though that they dropped this way of making animated features. Basically, when they noticed that Pixar popularity kept on growing with every movie and above all, after ‘ Shrek’ massive success, they found their new cash cow and nowadays, you have actually an overdoses of CGI features. Not only from Pixar and DreamWorks (whose features are not always amazing) but also from maybe 5 or 6 different studios and, in my opinion, the quality is not always there (even with Pixar nowadays..) and they make those movies above all because they are usually profitable. Anyway, this movie was basically a victim of this new hype and that’s too bad because it is actually pretty good and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in animated features.

7/10