With the recent release of The Croods: A New Age, ComingSoon.net is taking a look at some of the best movies Dreamworks Animation has to offer. Check out our selections in the gallery below!
RELATED: The Croods: A New Age Review
Always regarded as some sort of second-best in comparison to Walt Disney Pictures, Dreamworks Animation deserves some recognition in their own right. Of course their films don’t compare to Disney and Pixar’s biggest hits, but here’s the thing: Dreamworks Animation has never tried to compare. They’re at their absolute best when they’re diverting from the beaten path, straying from the well-trodden ground that Disney and Pixar have dominated for over two decades.
From children’s book adaptations to fairy tale adaptations to brand-new original stories of their own, Dreamworks Animation exists tangentially to Disney, Pixar, and all the other animation studios in the game. Sometimes they’re clearly trying to do their own spin on what another studio’s doing, but most of the time they’re just trying to make it on their own. These are the absolute greatest examples of that.
Dreamworks animation
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Chicken Run (2000)
Claymation is so great, but the only studios working with it today seem to be Laika and Aardman. Dreamworks Animation should invest in some more of it.
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How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Considered by many to be the pinnacle of Dreamworks Animation, How to Train Your Dragon and its subsequent sequels remain the highest achievement the studio has ever reached.
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Kung-Fu Panda (2008)
Jack Black can make just about any movie worth seeing. Kung-Fu Panda has a knockout cast with a really inventive story.
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Madagascar (2005)
Another one of the features that solidified Dreamworks Animation’s spot in the grand scheme of things, Madagascar spawned a couple sequels and quite a few spinoffs. Still, it’s quite good.
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Megamind (2010)
Megamind is a superhero movie with a pretty inventive concept: what if the supervillain won? Aided by Will Ferrell, Jonah Hill, and Tina Fey, Megamind sets out to answer this question.
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Rise of the Guardians (2012)
What better way to make a movie relevant all year long than to cash in on the symbols of every major holiday?
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Shrek (2001)
A close second to How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek showed the world what Dreamworks Animation could do during a time when no one could touch what Disney and Pixar were doing with computer animation.
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The Prince of Egypt (1998)
Part of a string of traditionally-animated Dreamworks movies from the late 90s and early 2000s, The Price of Egypt harkens back to classic cartoons from the mid-20th century.
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The Road to El Dorado (2000)
Spiritually similar to The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado utilizes a similar style of animation that no one in the business is working with.
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Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
It’s movies like Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit that allow Dreamworks to stand independently—Disney’s not messing around with claymation, so it makes perfect sense for another studio to corner the market.