It’s a damn good movie. Early DreamWorks films were really something else. I recently watched Road to El Dorado with my kids and seeing Cortez correctly portrayed as the bad guy, the incredibly witty writing, good character development and everything, it was clearly written with adults in mind as well.
There’s seriously a lot of good animated films from the late 90s/early 2000s that are like a peek into an alternate universe where animation as a medium was treated as a real art form and allowed to break out of the children’s market. I’ve seen some lay the blame at Shrek given how much of a breakout success it was and how different it was to anything else in film. Except rewatching it as an adult now it’s best moments are when it’s dunking on Disney and everything else is just a malaise of fart jokes and gross out humor. Peak comedy for an 8 year old, not much beyond that though.
Meanwhile you go watch Anastasia (1997) which was the first film produced by Fox Animation and you see something far darker but still beautifully animated and exquisitely written. My wife and I actually kept watching that one after my kids went to bed because the mix of real history, embellished mysticism and fiction was brilliant plus the animation and art style absolutely gorgeous.
Now that Disney owns basically everything it’s pretty sad to look at what could’ve been. I’ve seen it said that Japanese Animation is so popular because they treated it as an art form and took it seriously for both children’s and adult media, and it’s definitely another window into what the world would be like if the industry in the US stayed on that course from the early 00s
Dreamworks just produces mediocre slop with the occasional banger, the Shrek effect got nothing to do with it. They also gave us Kung Fu Panda, How to Train your Dragon, and The Last Wish over the years, which are all great. I’m also a fan of Wild Robot, although I think the third act doesn’t really flow as nicely as the previous ones.
I’ve seen it said that Japanese Animation is so popular because they treated it as an art form and took it seriously for both children’s and adult media, and it’s definitely another window into what the world would be like if the industry in the US stayed on that course from the early 00s
Most of the anime production of the last two decades is generic shonen slop, the fact that it became popular has nothing to do with taking it seriously and it’s not a metric of quality. There’s some good stuff in there amid the bad, but that’s the same for western animation.
Disney has had to deal with waves of competitors in animation and eras where they were the only game in town. If anything, now is one of the more competitive eras.
I would also note that a large part of building Anime as an industry was a combination of crunch time and using methods to reduce the cost of animation.
I recall seeing a quote, I think attributed to Osamu Tezuka: “This is not animation, this is anime”; implying that anime isn’t “real animation” like those you’d see in the 1930s and thus didn’t deserve the full name
It’s a damn good movie. Early DreamWorks films were really something else. I recently watched Road to El Dorado with my kids and seeing Cortez correctly portrayed as the bad guy, the incredibly witty writing, good character development and everything, it was clearly written with adults in mind as well.
There’s seriously a lot of good animated films from the late 90s/early 2000s that are like a peek into an alternate universe where animation as a medium was treated as a real art form and allowed to break out of the children’s market. I’ve seen some lay the blame at Shrek given how much of a breakout success it was and how different it was to anything else in film. Except rewatching it as an adult now it’s best moments are when it’s dunking on Disney and everything else is just a malaise of fart jokes and gross out humor. Peak comedy for an 8 year old, not much beyond that though.
Meanwhile you go watch Anastasia (1997) which was the first film produced by Fox Animation and you see something far darker but still beautifully animated and exquisitely written. My wife and I actually kept watching that one after my kids went to bed because the mix of real history, embellished mysticism and fiction was brilliant plus the animation and art style absolutely gorgeous.
Now that Disney owns basically everything it’s pretty sad to look at what could’ve been. I’ve seen it said that Japanese Animation is so popular because they treated it as an art form and took it seriously for both children’s and adult media, and it’s definitely another window into what the world would be like if the industry in the US stayed on that course from the early 00s
Dreamworks just produces mediocre slop with the occasional banger, the Shrek effect got nothing to do with it. They also gave us Kung Fu Panda, How to Train your Dragon, and The Last Wish over the years, which are all great. I’m also a fan of Wild Robot, although I think the third act doesn’t really flow as nicely as the previous ones.
Most of the anime production of the last two decades is generic shonen slop, the fact that it became popular has nothing to do with taking it seriously and it’s not a metric of quality. There’s some good stuff in there amid the bad, but that’s the same for western animation.
Disney has had to deal with waves of competitors in animation and eras where they were the only game in town. If anything, now is one of the more competitive eras.
I would also note that a large part of building Anime as an industry was a combination of crunch time and using methods to reduce the cost of animation.
I recall seeing a quote, I think attributed to Osamu Tezuka: “This is not animation, this is anime”; implying that anime isn’t “real animation” like those you’d see in the 1930s and thus didn’t deserve the full name