I know it's not the first time this has been discussed on this board, but FUCK IT, let's go again!
Dreamworks and Pixar are both excellent animation studios. Both of them combined are probably the biggest reason animation is considered a valid, respected film medium for ALL ages (at least, by people who aren't film snobs). I love them both... but I love Dreamworks more.
Why? Well, it has to do with the way each studio tells stories. If I had to break it down, I'd simply put it as this:
Pixar sets scenes better, Dreamworks tells better stories.
What do I mean by this? Well, think of how most of Pixar's most notable movies open. Toy Story, Up, Wall-E; pretty much Pixar's most famous films, or at least most noteworthy. Each of them opens with scenes, with little to no dialogue, perfectly encapsulating the setting of the story and making the plot that follows. All great, totally succeeding at drawing us in to the film's world. But their plots are just... simple. Simple isn't necessarily bad, in fact it's often very good, but it's limiting. There's not much more you can draw from a simple plot beyond basic emotional responses. Toy feels abandoned, finds out he's still loved, yay happy. Robot is alone, meets girl, loses girl, gets girl back, yay happy. Old man is alone and depressed, goes on adventure, learns to be happy again, yay happy. Again, those are all fine character plots, but they're simple in a way that makes them unrelatable. It's just characters in shit situations becoming happy at the end. It's childish, in that it's a story MEANT for children. That's fine, as they're the target audience, and they succeed at appealing to many adult's inner child as well. But they don't really provoke any thought, just "awwww"s and "yaaaaaay"s.
Meanwhile, in Dreamworks' most notable current series, Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, the stories appeal to children on a base level (yay! Funny animals! Yay! Dragons!) but the stories involve much more relatable themes for adults, both culturally and personally. Things like self-loathing and acceptance, responsibility, bias, inner peace, idealism. Even Shrek and Madagascar deal with typically adult issues, though Madagascar I think less so.
There are exceptions, of course. Finding Nemo is mostly about a father's loss of his child and how he deals with it. A Bug's Life is about standing up to bullies, a typical lesson for children, but still relatable to adults. And my favorite Pixar movie, The Incredibles, is a VERY adult-oriented film dressed up for the kiddies. Really though, the Incredibles is probably the only TRUE exception, as both Finding Nemo and A Bug's Life still deal with fairly simple, if relatable, issues.
The point I'm trying to make is that most of Pixar's characters don't feel like people to me, they feel like children, even if they don't look like children (or humans). I know children are technically people, but I mean people in the sense of a fully-actualized person. Dreamworks' characters are mostly adults, at the very least teenagers, and they FEEL like adults. They have depth, layers even, to use the Shrek quote.
Pixar's first project was a short film about a lamp playing with a ball. That lamp, with it's simple personality traits and child-like squeaks, represents much of what Pixar has done since to me. Dreamworks' first projects were Antz and the Prince of Egypt (released just a couple months apart), one film dealing with social hierarchy and a fascist military coup, the other dealing with a conflict between brothers and of course God and faith. That's a bit more complicated than an anthropomorphized desk lamp.
Anyway these are of course my opinions and analyses, nothing more. I won't say I wrote all this because I was bored, because if I was bored I could have easily found something else to do. Hell, I actually wrote most of it already once before, but my computer crashed before I could post it. I wrote it because I love talking about this stuff, so please tell me what you think about it.
Dreamworks and Pixar are both excellent animation studios. Both of them combined are probably the biggest reason animation is considered a valid, respected film medium for ALL ages (at least, by people who aren't film snobs). I love them both... but I love Dreamworks more.
Why? Well, it has to do with the way each studio tells stories. If I had to break it down, I'd simply put it as this:
Pixar sets scenes better, Dreamworks tells better stories.
What do I mean by this? Well, think of how most of Pixar's most notable movies open. Toy Story, Up, Wall-E; pretty much Pixar's most famous films, or at least most noteworthy. Each of them opens with scenes, with little to no dialogue, perfectly encapsulating the setting of the story and making the plot that follows. All great, totally succeeding at drawing us in to the film's world. But their plots are just... simple. Simple isn't necessarily bad, in fact it's often very good, but it's limiting. There's not much more you can draw from a simple plot beyond basic emotional responses. Toy feels abandoned, finds out he's still loved, yay happy. Robot is alone, meets girl, loses girl, gets girl back, yay happy. Old man is alone and depressed, goes on adventure, learns to be happy again, yay happy. Again, those are all fine character plots, but they're simple in a way that makes them unrelatable. It's just characters in shit situations becoming happy at the end. It's childish, in that it's a story MEANT for children. That's fine, as they're the target audience, and they succeed at appealing to many adult's inner child as well. But they don't really provoke any thought, just "awwww"s and "yaaaaaay"s.
Meanwhile, in Dreamworks' most notable current series, Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, the stories appeal to children on a base level (yay! Funny animals! Yay! Dragons!) but the stories involve much more relatable themes for adults, both culturally and personally. Things like self-loathing and acceptance, responsibility, bias, inner peace, idealism. Even Shrek and Madagascar deal with typically adult issues, though Madagascar I think less so.
There are exceptions, of course. Finding Nemo is mostly about a father's loss of his child and how he deals with it. A Bug's Life is about standing up to bullies, a typical lesson for children, but still relatable to adults. And my favorite Pixar movie, The Incredibles, is a VERY adult-oriented film dressed up for the kiddies. Really though, the Incredibles is probably the only TRUE exception, as both Finding Nemo and A Bug's Life still deal with fairly simple, if relatable, issues.
The point I'm trying to make is that most of Pixar's characters don't feel like people to me, they feel like children, even if they don't look like children (or humans). I know children are technically people, but I mean people in the sense of a fully-actualized person. Dreamworks' characters are mostly adults, at the very least teenagers, and they FEEL like adults. They have depth, layers even, to use the Shrek quote.
Pixar's first project was a short film about a lamp playing with a ball. That lamp, with it's simple personality traits and child-like squeaks, represents much of what Pixar has done since to me. Dreamworks' first projects were Antz and the Prince of Egypt (released just a couple months apart), one film dealing with social hierarchy and a fascist military coup, the other dealing with a conflict between brothers and of course God and faith. That's a bit more complicated than an anthropomorphized desk lamp.
Anyway these are of course my opinions and analyses, nothing more. I won't say I wrote all this because I was bored, because if I was bored I could have easily found something else to do. Hell, I actually wrote most of it already once before, but my computer crashed before I could post it. I wrote it because I love talking about this stuff, so please tell me what you think about it.
