The studio: DreamWorks Animation
DreamWorks Animation has always produced beautiful films with awesome designs, fantastic characters and very deep underlying themes in stories such as Shrek, Kunfu Panda, Puss in Boots, MegaMind and Madagascar. The very first films from DreamWorks that I absolutely love are The Prince of Egypt and The Road to Eldorado and of course Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.
The post is once again spoiler free so don't worry and carry on.
Madagascar 3
Before I watched Madagascar 3 for the first time I had been thinking about what is the real purpose of animation and why do we use animation to tell certain stories. I had felt for a while that sometimes the use of animation hasn't been clear enough in some films and the animation and the story had not been pushed to the area where the story could've been only told by animation and thus the use of animation justified.
Whilst watching Madagascar 3 though, I had a great epiphany and realised they had done exactly what I had been thinking about earlier - taking an average heist story and taking normal scenes to the next level by really understanding the limitlessness of CG animation and creating something that couldn't be done with any other medium. This scene in particular demostrates what I'm talking about and I think it's one of the best sequences in the film.
The Artists: Jason Schleifer
I want to mention Jason Shleifer - he is the head of character animation at Dreamworks and before he joined the feature animation studio in 2003 he used to work at Weta for the Lord of The Rings trilogy. I love his passion for animation and rigging and how he shares his knowledge through Internet and his masterclasses. He's also a lecturer at this year Anomalia and will teach about High-end Animation Polish. I'd love to go there! Here' is his great TED talk about character arch and motivation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LLpxRnPlRE
Here's also another great vidoe which has nothing to do with Dreamworks but everything to do with character archs and story. Kurt Vonnegut on the shape of stories:
Never stop animating and stay tooned!
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