Sunday, July 6, 2025

Rhode Island Movie Corner's DreamWorks Retrospective Series: Entry #7 - Final Round-Up Part 1 (1998-2009)

Greetings, folks, and welcome back to Rhode Island Movie Corner’s DreamWorks Retrospective series, where I tackle the extensive filmography of one of the most prolific animation studios in the film industry, DreamWorks Animation. Over the past few years, I’ve gone through the studio’s most prominent franchises, from the one that started it all, Shrek, to more modern hits such as How to Train Your Dragon and Trolls. I even did a whole post dedicated to the studio’s brief run of traditionally animated films. And for today’s post, we begin the final stretch of this journey through DreamWorks’ filmography as I go through the 24 films that I haven’t covered yet in one of these posts. As I’ve stated before, my primary criteria for doing the posts that were based around DreamWorks’ biggest franchises was if they at least produced a trilogy's worth of films. Some of the films that we’ll be talking about throughout the next few posts have gone on to have a sequel, but at the time that I’m writing this, Trolls is the most recent franchise to achieve the trilogy mark. Still, with so many films to get through, I’ll once again be splitting this section up into multiple parts to avoid one super-long post. Today’s part will be tackling the studio’s filmography from 1998 up till 2009, which means that we’ll go through DreamWorks’ partnership with Aardman Animations, see their first endeavors in the world of computer animation (that were, admittedly, accused by some of being knock-offs of their competitors’ productions), and answer the age-old question… you like jazz? Without further ado, here’s Part 1 of Rhode Island Movie Corner’s final stretch of DreamWorks Animation Retrospectives.

ANTZ (1998)

Shrek may have been the film that effectively made DreamWorks a household name in the world of computer animation, but it wasn’t the studio’s first computer-animated feature. Instead, that honor goes to DreamWorks’ first collaboration with Pacific Data Images from 1998, Antz, directed by the duo of future Madagascar director Eric Darnell and future Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas director Tim Johnson, both making their directorial debuts here. The film follows an ant named Z (voiced by Woody Allen) who has become disillusioned with being a lowly worker drone in a colony of millions. On one fateful night, he meets and falls in love with the colony’s princess, Bala (voiced by Sharon Stone); hoping to see her again, Z switches places with his best friend Weaver (voiced by Sylvester Stallone), a soldier ant, unknowingly ending up as an unwilling participant in a deadly battle against the ants’ dreaded enemies, the termites. Somehow managing to be the only survivor of the battle, Z then finds himself thrust out of the colony along with Bala and heads off on a journey to the mythical insect paradise known as ‘Insectopia’ while also dealing with a sinister plot enacted by Bala’s fiancé, General Mandible (voiced by Gene Hackman), to take over the colony and exterminate most of their fellow ants. Antz started out life a lot like The Prince of Egypt as a proposed project for Walt Disney Animation during Jeffrey Katzenberg’s tenure as the studio’s chairman under the name Army Ants. When Katzenberg left Disney to start DreamWorks, Army Ants was repackaged as the studio’s first computer animated feature… but, of course, anyone familiar with this film knows that this would then lead to what is easily this film’s most notorious aspect; its major similarities to Pixar’s 1998 film A Bug’s Life and how that became one of the cornerstones of the intense rivalry between the two studios.

Simply put, when Pixar chairman Steve Jobs and then-Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter learned about Antz’s production… they weren’t too happy about it. Citing a meeting between Lasseter and Jeffrey Katzenberg in 1995, where the former revealed the plans for A Bug’s Life, Lasseter and Jobs believed that Katzenberg stole their ideas despite Katzenberg’s claims that suggested otherwise. This budding rivalry between the two parties even extended to a war over the films’ release dates, with Disney scheduling A Bug’s Life to open the same weekend in November as DreamWorks’ first official animated production, The Prince of Egypt. When Disney refused to move A Bug’s Life’s release date and even scheduled a remake of Mighty Joe Young to go up against The Prince of Egypt when its release got moved to December, Katzenberg moved Antz’s release date from March of 1999 to October 2nd, 1998, a little over a month before A Bug’s Life was to hit theaters on November 20th, just so that DreamWorks could get their ant film out first. And while A Bug’s Life would ultimately be the victor financially (earning over $363 million worldwide compared to Antz’ $152 million+ haul), both films were relatively neck and neck in the eyes of critics, thus solidifying what is, to this day, still one of the most prominent examples of two studios releasing similarly themed films in the same year.

(Heck, this wasn’t even the only time that Disney and DreamWorks were involved in a film-centric rivalry that year given their involvement in the blockbuster double feature of space-based disaster flicks that was Armageddon (released under Disney’s Touchstone Pictures label) and Deep Impact (which DreamWorks produced with Paramount, who would become their animation studio’s distributor in 2006))

Now, I’m not really going to spend any time today comparing the two films from a quality standpoint because both films are genuinely great in their own unique ways. However, it is fascinating to discuss how vastly different these two films are from a tonal standpoint. Whereas A Bug’s Life is your traditional family-friendly Disney/Pixar film that keeps its proceedings light-hearted and appealing to all ages, Antz has a lot more edge to it despite it still having quite a lot of kid-friendly elements. As one can only expect from a project starring Woody Allen, there’s a whole bunch of adult references and profanity; PG-rated adult humor and profanity, to be clear, but nevertheless, still not the kind of thing that you’d normally expect from an animated film like this, whether it’d be Z stating that he’s uncomfortable “drinking from the anus of another creature” or him telling Bala during an argument between them that “he was going to let her become a part of his most erotic fantasies”. It also gets incredibly dark and violent at times; not only are major characters killed off… they’re often killed onscreen. At the end of the ants’ battle against the termites, Z finds his new friend Barbatus still alive for a few moments… albeit as a severed head. And in another scene, Z and Bala barely survive the scorching beam of light from a magnifying glass that directly vaporizes one of their fellow ants on the spot (in a close-up shot, no less!) and then proceeds to eradicate two of the other ants that were there with them.

I still vividly remember when I rewatched this film for the first time in quite a few years sometime in the mid 2000’s when it aired on Cartoon Network (I’m somewhat confident that I watched it on VHS at least once when I borrowed it from my hometown’s public library) and, even at age 10 or so, being completely surprised at how surprisingly dark it was for a film geared toward my demographic [at the time]. And yet, it does work out in this instance because it results in a delightfully off-beat comedic adventure that’s chock-full of quotable lines (e.g. “Who the hell is that?”, Z proclaims when he and Bala (who are trapped in the gum stuck on a human’s shoe) are wiped off by a penny and they see the profile of Abraham Lincoln rapidly approach them). Much of this is thanks to your typically stacked all-star DreamWorks Animation voice cast, with practically everybody being perfect fits in their respective roles. Woody Allen, as expected, brings his trademark neurotic humor to the role of Z and it translates well to the medium, undoubtedly thanks in large part to Allen doing some uncredited rewrites to ensure the dialogue matched his style (Disclaimer: To be clear, though, this is NOT a defense of Allen given… well, everything that we know about him…). And then you have other perfectly cast roles like Sharon Stone as the no-nonsense Bala, Sylvester Stallone as Z’s happy-go-lucky best friend Weaver, and Gene Hackman as the commanding yet subtly terrifying General Mandible. Plus, while it goes without saying that computer animation has come a long way in the nearly three decades since this film’s release, much of its animation still holds up relatively well today barring a few dated aesthetic choices; namely, the weirdly lanky proportions of any human characters. Granted, that can reasonably be seen as intentional given that the film is set from an ant’s perspective (especially since we don’t see any humans fully on-screen), but it still feels considerably off in a few shots during the previously mentioned ‘gum on shoe’ scene.

Ultimately, though, Antz is the perfect counterpoint to what Pixar gave us that year with their insect film, A Bug’s Life. With the latter, Pixar firmly established that they weren’t going to be a one-trick pony after the success of 1995’s Toy Story with another prime example of a classic Pixar masterpiece full of bright and colorful animation, heartfelt themes, and lovable characters. But as for Antz, both it and DreamWorks’ other animated feature of the year, The Prince of Egypt, firmly represented the kind of films that the studio were striving to make out the gate; edgier animated films that weren’t afraid to go to much darker places narratively speaking than what we tended to get out of Disney and Pixar films while still balancing all that out with more light-hearted elements so that the films could effectively appeal to both kids and adults. And unlike DreamWorks’ subsequent breakout hit Shrek, Antz’s sharp sense of humor isn’t driven solely by the need to one-up Disney, which is saying something given that this was literally DreamWorks’ whole modus operandi. Obviously, once Shrek came out and became a generation-defining hit, DreamWorks’ approach to developing their animated films changed considerably, thus leaving a film like Antz as a relic of a bygone era, especially since it’s one of their rare one-off features that didn’t get a sequel. One was planned back in the day, originally set for a direct-to-video release but potentially viable for a theatrical release, before it was scrapped not long after DreamWorks shuttered its television animation department. But for those curious to see where DreamWorks truly got their start in the world of computer animation, Antz is a solidly entertaining ‘first feature’ that, at the risk of using an incredibly cliched phrase to properly describe it, is certainly not your typical animated feature when compared to its peers.

Rating: 4.5/5

CHICKEN RUN (2000)

In the process of turning DreamWorks Animation into a legitimate rival to Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg sought to have the same kind of mutually beneficial relationship that Disney had achieved through their work with Pixar. Ultimately, DreamWorks’ answer to Pixar would end up being Aardman Animations, the U.K.-based stop-motion animation studio well-known for their beloved Claymation projects such as Wallace & Gromit and Creature Comforts. During a pitch meeting between the heads of the two studios, Aardman mainstay (and Wallace & Gromit creator) Nick Park and studio co-founder Peter Lord presented a story of chickens attempting to escape from their farm in a manner reminiscent of the 1963 classic war film The Great Escape. DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg was instantly won over by this pitch, citing his love of The Great Escape and the fact that he owned a chicken farm, thus resulting in the two studios agreeing to a five-picture deal and Park and Lord teaming up to co-direct Aardman’s first feature-length film, Chicken Run. As noted earlier, the film follows a flock of chickens, led by the strong-willed Ginger, as they try to escape from their farm, which is run with an iron grip by the malicious Mrs. Tweedy and her dim-witted yet obedient husband, who kill off any chickens who aren’t providing them with enough eggs. When the threat of death starts to become more inevitable when Mrs. Tweedy elects to turn the farm into a chicken pie making operation to improve its overall profit, Ginger and company attempt to try and ‘fly’ out of the farm with the help of an American rooster named Rocky, who they believe can fly… completely unaware that Rocky is just a circus performer who only ‘flies’ when he is shot out of a cannon.  

It should go without saying that Aardman’s first feature-length production proved to be the most ambitious and challenging project that they’d ever made at the time, but for the most part, Katzenberg and his team at DreamWorks didn’t interfere with the production too much, which is something that, unfortunately, can’t be said about the two studios’ subsequent productions. Katzenberg even publicly defended the film’s unmistakably British nature when some press outlets took note of it, stating that it didn’t matter if you weren’t able to fully understand the British terms that it used because you could still understand ‘what’ is being said and that this was all an essential part of its charm. And thankfully for both parties, Chicken Run proved to be a sizable hit upon its release. With a $227 million+ haul, it became the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time, a record that it still holds to this day. Critically, the film was so well-received amongst critics and audiences that it is often cited as the primary catalyst behind the Academy Awards creating a category for Best Animated Feature after it didn’t garner a Best Picture nomination despite being one of the best-reviewed films of the year. Simply put, calling Chicken Run a success story would be a massive understatement as it’s a first-class example of all the talent and craftsmanship that has gone into every single Aardman production. The hand-crafted charm of their Claymation process (which, for those unfamiliar with stop-motion animation, is the very definition of an arduous process that usually only elicits about a minute of film per a single week of filming) shines through in every single meticulously constructed and exquisitely detailed frame of animation, resulting in what is not only one of the best-looking animated films of its time but quite frankly still one of the best two and a half decades later.  

Of course, as one would expect from Aardman, their sharp-witted sense of humor is also on point throughout, with all sorts of great visual gags that are naturally complemented by the equally terrific animation and snappy one-liners delivered by a fun cast of characters, with notable supporting players such as the good-natured yet ditzy Babs and the hilariously cranky and old-fashioned rooster Fowler (“WHAT WHAT!?”). But as delightfully comedic as Chicken Run is, it also fully succeeds in endearing you to the main protagonists by properly illustrating how utterly desperate of a situation they’re in at the farm, where the threat of death is always apparent to the point where, in an early scene, one of their fellow chickens is executed by the Tweedys in a sequence that, while not directly shown on-screen, doesn’t shy away from its horrific implications that could very well affect the other characters if they ever ended up facing the same fate (and in a G-rated film, no less!). The film itself ultimately results in a much happier ending for our main protagonists than the one for the characters in the film that it was directly inspired by, The Great Escape, but that doesn’t mean that this film’s main antagonist, Mrs. Tweedy (brilliantly voiced by Miranda Richardson), isn’t one of the most wicked antagonists in animation history, thus making the chickens’ escape from the farm an undeniably cathartic moment. In other words, this is a film that, while largely comedic in tone, is also smart enough to be serious and emotional at precisely the right moments, thus finding a perfect tonal balance.

Really, what more can be said about Chicken Run that hasn’t been said already? There’s a damn good reason why this is still regarded as one of the best animated films of all time as it wholly exemplifies why Aardman Animations continues to be one of the most revered animation studios in the industry. Easily one of the best examples of all the hard work that the team at Aardman has put into every single one of their projects, Chicken Run is an animated flick whose overall quality shines through in every considerable aspect of its production, whether it’s its charmingly hand-crafted animation, its lovable characters, or its sharp-witted script that effortlessly mixes in moments of innate emotional poignancy throughout this primarily comedic spin on the wartime genre. Thus, it’s not too surprising to see that not long after the film’s release, Jeffrey Katzenberg was eager to see Aardman produce a sequel, which they declined to do at the time given all the effort that was needed just to finish the first film. Ultimately, it wouldn’t be until after Aardman severed ties with DreamWorks that they would finally make the long-awaited follow-up, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, which was released on Netflix in 2023. That film would go on to garner similarly positive reviews from critics but, at the same time, was seen by some as an underwhelming sequel (not to mention the controversy that emerged over the decision to recast the role of Ginger, with original voice actress Julia Sawalha stating that it was due to her being considered ‘too old’ to return). But regardless of where you stand on Dawn of the Nugget, the original Chicken Run still stands as an indisputable Aardman classic.

Rating: 4.5/5

SHARK TALE (2004)

Earlier, we discussed all the hubbub surrounding the release of DreamWorks’ first computer-animated film, Antz, in 1998 due to its many similarities with Pixar’s own insect-based film from that year, A Bug’s Life. Well, if you need another example of when DreamWorks was accused of trying to copy the winning formula behind one of Pixar’s many hits, look no further than their holiday 2004 release Shark Tale, directed by the trio of Shrek co-director Vicky Jenson, The Road to El Dorado co-director Bibo Bergeron, and Rob Letterman, who went on to direct films like 2019’s Pokémon: Detective Pikachu and notably produced the original animated test footage for Shrek alongside none other than J.J. Abrams. Shark Tale (originally titled Sharkslayer before it was rebranded into its current (and much more family-friendly) title) hit theaters a little over a year after Pixar’s fish-centric 2003 release Finding Nemo and, while completely unrelated to the Pixar-DreamWorks rivalry, just one month before a certain sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea made his big-screen debut with The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. Finding Nemo would go on to become one of Pixar’s biggest hits up to that point, earning nearly $1 billion worldwide, that year’s Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and eventually securing the record for the best-selling DVD of all time. Shark Tale, on the other hand, didn’t end up reaching those same heights. It did a respectable run at the box office, earning nearly $375 million worldwide, and it even earned an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. But aside from the argument that it more than likely stood no chance against the likes of DreamWorks’ other 2004 release Shrek 2 and that year’s eventual winner, Pixar and Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, Shark Tale was a dud with critics; its 35% rating on Rotten Tomatoes still stands as the lowest-rated film that any DreamWorks film has garnered on that site more than two decades since its release. Simply put, this is quite arguably the one DreamWorks film that is cited as the epitome of the studio’s long-standing reputation for making animated films that were often accused of being nothing more than pop-culture dependent kiddie flicks… and in this instance, it’s easy to see why.  

Shark Tale revolves around a fish named Oscar (voiced by Will Smith), a lowly worker at the local Whale Wash who dreams of getting out of his life as a ‘nobody’ and becoming rich and famous so he can become a ‘somebody’ within his community, the Southside Reef. However, most of Oscar’s harebrained attempts at making it big end up failing spectacularly, often putting him in serious financial trouble with his pufferfish boss, Mr. Sykes (voiced by Martin Scorsese… yes, THAT Martin Scorsese), who is financially pressured himself by his ‘boss’, Don Lino (voiced by Robert De Niro), the leader of a shark mob that has been regularly terrorizing the Southside Reef. But, amid dealing with the consequences of his latest failed attempt at a get-rich scheme, Oscar suddenly finds himself blessed with the opportunity he’d been looking for when he gets chased by a shark, Don Lino’s son Frankie (voiced by Michael Imperioli), who ends up getting killed by a falling anchor. With any potential onlookers being led to believe that Oscar was the one who killed the shark, Oscar boldly proclaims that he did and promptly becomes Southside’s most popular celebrity, the ‘Sharkslayer’… despite having never killed an actual shark. Thus, to help maintain his newfound fame, Oscar ends up teaming up with the most unlikely of allies, Don Lino’s other son Lenny (voiced by Jack Black) who, unlike his father, brother, and fellow sharks is a vegetarian, to keep convincing everyone that he’s the real deal, all while dealing with the inevitable retaliation that’s sure to come from a vengeful Don Lino.

Plot-wise, Shark Tale is probably one of the most blatant cases of the straightforward trope of a main protagonist who profits off a lie that eventually comes back to bite them in the end. And in this case, the results are largely disastrous since Oscar is an incredibly unlikable main protagonist because of his self-serving motives. Most of the characters in this film are downright unlikable, in fact, with the only major exceptions being the wholly sympathetic Lenny and Oscar’s best friend and love interest Angie (voiced by Renée Zellweger), who is constantly taken advantage of by the supposed love of her life. But, of course, when it comes to Shark Tale, the one point that always gets brought up when it comes to the major critiques of this film is its animation; specifically, its character animation, where a considerable effort was made to make all the fish characters’ facial designs resemble their respective voice actors. This method of animation has been a staple of the medium for several years and has appeared in plenty of DreamWorks films both before and after this film, but in this case, I do agree that it doesn’t work as well as the animators hoped it would as it ends up making the fish characters in this film a bit too humanlike in design. At the very least, the rest of the animation helps to make up for this shortcoming with a nicely cool color design that never gets dark to the point of looking too creepy for kids and some fun set/location visuals that do a great job of crafting a unique underwater metropolis regardless of how much it may rely on product placement.

As for the film’s voice cast, one could say that this is one of the most flagrant examples of DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg’s method of relying primarily on a celebrity voice cast to sell the studio’s animated films rather than the usual merits of the medium. Still, for what it’s worth, this film does feature a solid voice cast, even if none of them get that much of value to work with. Oscar may be an unlikable main protagonist, but Will Smith still manages to convey just enough of his well-established magnetic screen presence in the role. Meanwhile, Jack Black (four years before he would take on his definitive DreamWorks role as Po in the Kung Fu Panda films) brings solid laughs as Lenny, Renée Zellweger is her typical adorable self as Angie, and as crazy as it is to see legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese in a voice role, he surprisingly does an incredibly respectable job as Oscar’s short-tempered boss Mr. Sykes. Plus, it is rather fun to see him work directly with Robert De Niro, his most frequent acting collaborator, in any scenes that involve Sykes and Don Lino. Ultimately, though, Shark Tale’s status as one of DreamWorks’ worst-received films is, admittedly, quite well-warranted. Sure, this was one of the many DreamWorks films that I grew up with right alongside the likes of Shrek and Madagascar, but upon rewatch, this was very much a prime example of ‘a film you liked as a kid that doesn’t hold up as well as it used to’ as it’s wholly undone by a weak script, poorly-conceived and unsympathetic characters, and some highly questionable animation choices.

Rating: 1.5/5

WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT (2005)

With the success of Chicken Run under their belt, DreamWorks was more than ready to see what Aardman’s next feature film was going to be. After considering an adaptation of the classic Aesop fable The Tortoise and the Hare, which was ultimately abandoned due to script issues, it was decided that it was time to bring one of Aardman’s most beloved franchises to the big screen. Thus, Nick Park teamed up with Aardman animator Steve Box to direct the first feature film to star the iconic duo of the good-natured yet bumbling cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his loyal (and quite arguably smarter) canine companion Gromit, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Ever since their original debut in the 1989 short film A Grand Day Out, the ambitious college project that led to Nick Park becoming an Aardman mainstay, the dynamic duo have gone on to become certifiable animated icons, with all four of their short films (the other three being 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, 1995’s A Close Shave, and 2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death) earning Oscar nominations for Best Animated Short, with The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave winning in their respective years. As for the film (which was originally subtitled The Great Vegetable Plot before it was retitled due to negative feedback from test market researchers), it follows Wallace and Gromit as they deal with a mysterious creature dubbed ‘the Were-Rabbit’ that has been threatening their town by eating their neighbors’ produce that was intended for the local Giant Vegetable Festival. However, their efforts to try and capture the creature end up becoming more difficult than anticipated when the catalyst behind its creation is revealed to be something that ends up hitting a bit too close to home.

Unfortunately for Aardman, this is where DreamWorks started to exert a more controlling presence on their work. There had been a few creative conflicts between the two studios during the production of Chicken Run (such as DreamWorks tapping John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams to do the score rather than Wallace & Gromit composer Julian Nott), but it started to become more of a problem once DreamWorks’ outlook on animation changed drastically into a more commercial mindset following the success of the first Shrek in 2001. As a result, Nick Park frequently faced executive meddling from DreamWorks higher-ups, who encouraged him to make the film more ‘American’, whether it was giving Wallace a nicer car rather than his beat-up van or even daring to suggest that Wallace’s longtime voice actor, Peter Sallis, be replaced. Thankfully, neither of these suggestions ended up being implemented into the film, with Aardman seemingly appeasing DreamWorks’ voice-acting request by bringing in big-name stars such as Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes to play the film’s new characters. And even then, DreamWorks was apparently still unsatisfied with the lack of a trendy voice cast, which is ironic since this was right around the time that Fiennes and Bonham Carter would become involved with one of the biggest film franchises of the era, Harry Potter, by playing the series’ main antagonist Voldemort and his dedicated lieutenant Bellatrix Lestrange, respectively.

Fortunately for Aardman, all this interference didn’t end up having that big of a damper on the film’s reception once it was released. While it did underperform in the U.S. financially, only doing about $56 million, international audiences helped it make over $192 million worldwide on what was notably the lowest budget that any DreamWorks film at the time had at just $30 million. And despite being nominated the same year as legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit would end up netting the Wallace & Gromit franchise its third Oscar, Nick Park’s fourth overall, and its first for Best Animated Feature, which was also DreamWorks’ second in that category after Shrek won the inaugural award in 2001. Despite all this, however, it seems that fans of Wallace & Gromit tend to be a bit split on this installment of the franchise. Now, to be clear, that’s not to say that it’s considered ‘bad’ or anything; it’s just that, given everything that we’ve gone over about all the times that DreamWorks attempted to make it more appealing to American audiences, many have debated whether this did end up having a significant impact on the film by ‘robbing’ it of the franchise’s trademark British charm. Personally, I’d say that Aardman thankfully managed to largely maintain all their usual narrative trademarks; their reliance on top-notch visual gags (complete with a few risqué ones, even), their sharp and dry-witted sense of humor, and of course most importantly with the Wallace & Gromit franchise, keeping Gromit as the silent yet fully expressive protagonist that he’s always been. As a result, I’d dare argue that Curse of the Were-Rabbit ends up being the funniest installment of the entire Wallace & Gromit series, which is truly saying something given all the brilliant comedic highlights that have come to define it.

And yet, even the creative decisions that, by most accounts, were the ones mandated by DreamWorks end up working out all right. Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, AKA who Aardman brought in to appease DreamWorks’ demand for a star-studded voice cast, are both fantastic in their respective roles; Bonham Carter as Lady Tottington, the kind-hearted aristocratic socialite and proprietor of the Giant Vegetable Festival who becomes Wallace’s love interest, and Fiennes as Tottington’s smug game-hunting suitor Victor Quartermaine. And, of course, Peter Sallis is just as great as he’s always been as our favorite lovably short-sighted cheese-loving inventor Wallace. Pair all this with Aardman’s fantastic stop-motion animation and you have yet another one of their many masterpieces. While I didn’t end up seeing this one in theaters, I was, at least, familiar with the Wallace & Gromit franchise back when this came out thanks to my fourth-grade teacher showing us the original trilogy of A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave. That still stands as a fond memory of my elementary school years (minus the part where my classmates teased me for having the same first name as A Close Shave’s breakout supporting character and future Aardman superstar Shaun the Sheep (even though that’s not how I spell my first name, Sean)) and I would end up seeing the film once it hit DVD when it was played for me and my classmates on one of those end-of-the-year off-days in fifth grade. Simply put, regardless of whatever DreamWorks tried to do to give Wallace & Gromit an American identity, Aardman successfully managed to stick to their guns and, thus, thoroughly proved why this iconic BRITISH duo was truly worthy of gracing the big screen.

Rating: 5/5!

OVER THE HEDGE (2006)

In 2006, DreamWorks Animation (now its own publicly traded company once DreamWorks spun it off from the main studio and put its shares up for sale on the New York Stock Exchange in 2004) agreed to a distribution deal with Paramount Pictures, thus resulting in the U.S.’ second-oldest film studio taking on the distribution rights to not only DreamWorks’ pre-existing lineup of animated films but also their newest releases up until the tail-end of 2012. And as for the first major production that was released under these two studios’ newfound partnership, that honor would go to Over the Hedge, based on the 1995 comic strip of the same name by author Michael Fry and artist Thomas Leslie Lewis III (AKA T Lewis) and directed by the duo of Antz and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas’ Tim Johnson and, in his directorial debut, Karey Kirkpatrick, who wrote the screenplay for DreamWorks’ first Aardman feature Chicken Run and would then go on to create the Tony-nominated musical Something Rotten! with his older brother Wayne. The film follows a gang of woodland creatures who awaken from their annual hibernation to discover that much of their forest home has been leveled and replaced with a massive suburban neighborhood; only a small patch of the forest now remains, separated from the neighborhood by a giant hedge. Now finding themselves in a perilous predicament over the fear of not being able to scrounge up enough food to last them through the next winter, the gang is approached by a charismatic raccoon named RJ, who shows them the ins and outs of the suburbs so that they can collect food from their new human neighbors… all while being completely unaware that RJ is secretly using them to collect enough food so that he can pay off the massive debt that he owes to a bear named Vincent after accidentally destroying Vincent’s own stockpile of food.  

Over the Hedge did quite well for itself upon its release on a critical and commercial level. It earned nearly $340 million worldwide and while it ended up getting snubbed for Best Animated Feature at that year’s Oscars, it was still well-received by most critics. That said, though, it seems to me like a lot of DreamWorks critics tend to view this as another one of the studio’s generic ‘pop culture dependent kiddie flicks’, especially since it ended up being one of the studio’s rare one-offs as, despite a $340 million cume, that, apparently, wasn’t enough to convince studio executives to greenlight a sequel… and that’s a shame because this is easily one of DreamWorks’ most underrated gems. For a film that does, admittedly, revolve around quite a few of the common narrative tropes that populated some of DreamWorks’ films at the time, it works far better with those concepts in ways that a film like Shark Tale didn’t. Sure, its main character RJ may be your standard smooth-talking con artist selling a lie that he gradually loses control of over time, but thanks to a charismatic lead voice performance by Bruce Willis, RJ manages to be a decently likable character who, thanks to the genuine bond that he forms with his new friends, gets to have a legitimately satisfying redemption arc when the time comes for him to save those whom he now considers his family. RJ’s maverick personality is then contrasted perfectly by Garry Shandling as the woodland gang’s leader, Verne the turtle, who, despite his generally cynical attitude, is a dedicated paternal figure to the rest of his pals.

In general, Over the Hedge sports a delightful (and all-around likable) cast of main protagonists, voiced by a highly entertaining voice cast. There’s Steve Carell in one of his first big roles after his breakout turn as Michael Scott in the U.S. adaptation of The Office as the hilariously hyperactive squirrel Hammy, Wanda Sykes as the no-nonsense skunk Stella, and William Shatner as Ozzie the opossum who, in classic Shatner fashion, goes fully over-the-top whenever he ‘plays possum’, just to name a few. The film also features a hilarious trio of main antagonists in the form of RJ’s aggressive adversary Vincent the Bear (voiced by Nick Nolte), the suburbs’ easily short-tempered ‘Karen’ of a Homeowners’ Association President Gladys Sharp (voiced by Allison Janney), and comically pompous exterminator Dwayne LaFontant AKA ‘The Verminator’ (voiced by Thomas Haden Church). And while I can’t say that Over the Hedge features some of the most polished animation to come out of DreamWorks, it still deserves quite a bit of credit for its pleasantly bright Spring-based color palette and for being one of the first DreamWorks films at the time to showcase the kind of zany and energetic animation techniques that would come to define a bunch of the studio’s best films circa the start of the 2010’s. Bear in mind, this all comes from one of the rare instances of a DreamWorks Animation project that did not go on to become one of the studio’s big franchises; it only ever garnered a few video game spin-offs that were released the same year. As such, Over the Hedge easily stands as one of DreamWorks Animation’s most underrated films thanks to its hilariously sharp-witted satire of suburban culture and its lovable characters who epitomize its heartwarming vibes.

Rating: 4.5/5

FLUSHED AWAY (2006)

Despite all the success that Aardman had managed to achieve with DreamWorks thanks to Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, it was clear that the relationship between the two studios had started to become incredibly rocky in the mid-2000’s due to the latter starting to exert a more aggressive level of creative control over the former. As a result, the two studios announced in 2006 that they would terminate their contract with each other (albeit in a reportedly amicable fashion, per their words) by the start of the following year, with the announcement coming just a few weeks before the release of what would be their third and final film together, Flushed Away. Later, the film itself would be cited as a major factor behind the dissolution of their partnership since, upon its release, Flushed Away would end up being one of DreamWorks’ biggest commercial duds. While not outright panned by critics, it only earned a little over $178 million on a rather hefty $149 million budget (with only a little over $64 million of that coming from the U.S.), which led to DreamWorks suffering a $109 million loss, the second highest in their history at the time after the $125 million loss that they had gone through back in 2003 with Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. At the same time, the team at Aardman were also dealing with quite a lot on their plate after a fire had destroyed the warehouse where they had been archiving the materials from all their previous productions a year prior and were once again hounded by DreamWorks to make the film more American in tone and style while also being rushed to have it done in time for a holiday 2006 release date.

Flushed Away first came to be during the production of Chicken Run as a pitch made by Aardman animator Sam Fell, who would later go on to direct the Chicken Run sequel Dawn of the Nugget. The project was officially announced in 2002 under the direction of Fell and fellow Aardman animator David Bowers, who would later go on to direct the sequels to the 2010 live-action adaptation of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and would end up being a major first for the studio as it was set to be their first computer animated production. The decision to do so was due to the team at Aardman realizing that it’d be difficult to film a stop-motion animated film with a plot that heavily revolves around water since real water would damage their distinctive plasticine models and it’d be far too expensive to composite it all digitally (them being forced to have the film done in time for its holiday release certainly didn’t help, either). The film revolves around a rat named Roddy St. James (voiced by Hugh Jackman), who lives a charmed life as the pampered house rat of a family from Kensington. Whilst enjoying the house to himself when his family goes on vacation, Roddy’s peaceful solitude is broken by the arrival of a rowdy rat from the sewers named Sid (voiced by Shane Richie) who has no intention of leaving. And unfortunately for Roddy, his efforts to get Sid out of the house by flushing him down the toilet end up backfiring as Roddy gets flushed down instead by Sid and ends up in an underground city of rats known as Ratropolis. There, he teams up with a street-smart scavenging boat captain named Rita Malone (voiced by Kate Winslet) to hopefully get back home and to stop a sinister Toad (voiced by Ian McKellen) from flooding the city as revenge against all rats for being replaced by a rat as the favorite pet of Prince* (at the time of release, anyway) Charles.

While this may have been Aardman’s first time producing a CGI-animated film, they still made a considerable effort to make the animation look and feel like it was done like one of their stop-motion animated features. Not only do all the character models often feature the type of fingerprint marks that are left by stop-motion animators whenever they move practical models around for each shot, but their facial and mouth movements are also animated in a way to make it look like they’re being animated frame-by-frame. This significant attention to detail feels very much in line with Aardman’s typical level of artistry and helps to make up for the incredibly rare instances of any shot where it does, admittedly, feel like a studio’s first foray into computer animation (which wouldn’t be the case with Aardman’s other computer animated film, 2011’s Arthur Christmas). But regardless of how it was animated, Flushed Away still boasts all the classic narrative trademarks of an Aardman production such as a sharp sense of humor and its delightful cast of characters. Roddy and Rita are a naturally likable lead duo (with Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet boasting phenomenal comedic camaraderie and romantic chemistry) but the true stars of the show are the villains; Ian McKellen as the sinister yet classy Toad, Jean Reno as the Toad’s sardonic French cousin Le Frog, and Andy Serkis and Bill Nighy as the Toad’s bumbling lackeys Spike and Whitey (Nighy, especially, as the hilariously daft Whitey).  

It's safe to say that Flushed Away is the one Aardman film that tends to get overlooked the most, whether it was due to it becoming defined by all the chaos that was going on behind the scenes between DreamWorks and Aardman, its lackluster run at the box-office, or perhaps most significantly of all, its status as one of Aardman’s rare forays into computer animation that, to some, makes it feel like the black sheep of their filmography. And yet, I must admit that upon my most recent rewatch of this film, I found myself liking it even more than when I reviewed it as part of my Aardman Retrospective back in 2018, where I gave it a 4/5. Because of this, I now consider it to be a highly underrated gem of the early 2000s, which may have something to do with the fact that this may be the one Aardman film that I have the most experience with. Like Curse of the Were-Rabbit, this wasn’t a film that I saw in theaters… but it WAS the only Aardman feature-length film that I owned on DVD growing up and I can safely say that I rewatched this one just as much as I did with the likes of the first two Shrek films and Madagascar even if plenty of Aardman’s trademark referential jokes undoubtedly flew over my head as a kid. Thus, just like many other DreamWorks films that tend to have a lesser reputation given their status as a notorious box-office flop like The Road to El Dorado and Penguins of Madagascar, Flushed Away is a film that’s far better than what its reputation as the film that largely killed the working relationship between DreamWorks and Aardman may imply. Sure, it may not have the exact same level of visual splendor as one of Aardman’s stop-motion animated features, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks the studio’s trademark sense of humor and charm.

Rating: 4.5/5

BEE MOVIE (2007)

Welcome to Rhode Island Movie Corner’s review of DreamWorks’ Bee Movie, where, every time the word ‘Bee’ is mentioned, the font size increases by two points. How many times will the word ‘Bee’ pop up? Peruse this review of Bee Movie to find out…

Ok, ok, I’m not really going to do that; that was just my way of acknowledging the… ‘unique’ reputation that this film has garnered in the years since its release. Directed by the duo of Simon J. Smith (The Penguins of Madagascar) and Steve Hickner (The Prince of Egypt), Bee Movie was notably the first major project that legendary comedian Jerry Seinfeld headlined after the conclusion of his eponymous sitcom, the one and only Seinfeld, in 1998. Along with co-writing the script, Seinfeld stars as Barry B. Benson, a young bee who’s about to join his hive’s honey-making business. However, upon learning that he’ll be stuck in whatever job he picks for the rest of his life, Barry starts to become uncertain of what he wants to do with his life. On a whim, he manages to sweet-talk his way into tagging along with the hive’s most famous workers, the Pollen Jocks, on their next trip outside the hive to harvest the pollen that the hive needs to make honey. And once Barry gets to experience the outside world for the first time in his life, he soon finds himself in all sorts of crazy situations. He meets and befriends a human florist named Vanessa (voiced by Renée Zellweger) after she saves him from getting squished, learns that humans have been exploiting many of his fellow bees for their honey, sues the human race over this, and ends up partaking in a time-sensitive heist revolving around the annual Rose Parade when his honey-saving crusade starts to have a significantly negative impact on the environment.

So yeah… this is an incredibly weird film once you start delving into its plot. Heck, I didn’t even mention some of the other surreal aspects of this film, such as its random cameos from the likes of Sting and Ray Liotta or, of course, the infamous sexual undertones revolving around the relationship between Barry and Vanessa that even Jerry Seinfeld eventually admitted were a step too far. But as far as it fares as a comedy, I’d say that Bee Movie delivers plenty of laughs. To be clear, not every joke hits, and, as you might have guessed, this film does not relent on its efforts to utilize every bee-related pun imaginable no matter how forced it may be. Ultimately, though, there are quite a lot of funny quotable lines in this film, though I must stress that I’m not just saying this because practically all of them have been meme’d to death at this point by the internet. Animation-wise, Bee Movie is, surprisingly, one of DreamWorks’ best-looking films of the era. Like Over the Hedge, its color palette evokes a pleasant spring aesthetic and the film does a great job of presenting the massive scale of the human world through the eyes of a small bee. As for its voice cast, Jerry Seinfeld is… well, basically Jerry Seinfeld in the lead role of Barry, but he’s clearly having a lot of fun in the role and he manages to keep Barry as a likable main protagonist throughout. The same applies to Renée Zellweger (in her second appearance in today’s post, no less…) as Barry’s kind-hearted human friend Vanessa with additional solid performances from the likes of Matthew Broderick as Barry’s neurotic but loyal best friend Adam and Chris Rock in a small but memorable cameo as a happy-go-lucky mosquito nicknamed ‘Mooseblood’ that Barry befriends during his adventures out in the human world.

But now it’s time to address the elephant in the room… the fact that, in recent years, Bee Movie has gone on to join the likes of Shrek as one of the most prominent sources of the internet’s modern meme culture. Now, there are a lot of factors behind this, as many would describe it, ‘inexplicable’ turn of events; as we alluded to earlier, much of this is thanks to all the discourse surrounding the film’s notoriously surreal story elements. This, of course, includes the infamous subtext surrounding the relationship between Barry and Vanessa, which, for the record, has always been something of a public misconception about the film as it never goes ‘that far’ with any ‘romantic’ implications; Barry and Vanessa’s friendship is simply a platonic one. But if you were to delve into what is arguably the primary catalyst behind the film’s memetic nature, that largely stems from a seemingly endless array of videos on sites like YouTube that edit either the film itself or its theatrical trailer to achieve a certain comedic effect. One of the most popular was a 2016 video posted by the YouTube account ‘Avoid at All Costs’, which edited the film to speed up whenever the word ‘bee’ is mentioned (side note, for those who are curious, it is said 135 times). Other videos might replace the word ‘bee’ with another line from the film, such as when Barry attempts to talk to Vanessa for the first time and wonders if he should start the conversation by asking her, “You like jazz?”. Ultimately, though, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this film’s transformation into a memetic phenomenon is the fact that, unlike something like Shrek, which still stands as one of the most iconic animated films of all-time even with all the bizarre (and sometimes obscene) memes that have been made about it, the same can’t exactly be said for Bee Movie if based on how it fared with critics and audiences upon its initial release.

It only did moderately well at the box office, grossing about $293.5 million on a rather hefty $150 million budget. Critics, meanwhile, were largely split about the film, often citing its unabashed randomness as the source of its polarizing nature, and sure enough, that’s a near-perfect summation of exactly what kind of film Bee Movie is. Its unapologetically offbeat nature is quite arguably its biggest selling point, which I’d say is ultimately both its best and worst feature. On the one hand, there’s something to genuinely admire about how it certainly doesn’t abide by the traditional standards of animation and storytelling… but on the other hand, some of the tangents that it goes off on are, to put it nicely… odd. But thanks to some legitimately solid animation and a fun voice cast, Bee Movie is a largely harmless family flick if you’re able to come into it without being completely influenced by the seemingly endless impact that it’s had on meme culture. That’s certainly where someone like me comes into play as I do remember this being one of my favorite DreamWorks films growing up (even if I never owned it on DVD) and I’m not exactly someone who’s particularly well-versed (or quite frankly interested, for that matter…) in the world of memes. Thus, while I realize that I must always stress from now on that my reasons for liking this film are not because of all the memes that it’s inspired, I can also feel quite confident in saying that this is one of DreamWorks’ most casually enjoyable outings.

Rating: 4/5

MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (2009)

The final film that we’ll be discussing in today’s installment of the DreamWorks Retrospective series is DreamWorks’ 2009 outing Monsters vs. Aliens, directed by the duo of Conrad Vernon, co-director of Shrek 2 and voice of the Shrek franchise’s fan-favorite supporting player Gingy the Gingerbread Man, and Rob Letterman in his second of two directorial outings for DreamWorks after Shark Tale. And on a personal note, it’s ultimately quite fitting that this is the last film that we’ll be discussing for today’s post as this was the last DreamWorks film that I saw in theaters back when I used to see them all whenever they came out. After this, I only proceeded to go see a couple on occasion, which means that apart from one notable exception in Part 2, every subsequent DreamWorks film that we’ll be discussing from here on out will be a first-time viewing for me. Anyway, going back to Monsters vs. Aliens, as that title suggests, the film is a send-up of classic sci-fi B-movies of the 50s, utilizing plenty of imagery and archetypes from the films of that era. When Earth is invaded by the sinister Gallaxhar, who is hellbent on conquering the planet, Army General W.R. Monger encourages the President to assemble a team made up of monsters that the government has been holding captive in Area 51 to take on this alien threat. Said team consists of a prehistoric primate/reptile hybrid known as ‘The Missing Link’, Dr. Herbert Cockroach Ph.D., a scientist who fused his DNA with a cockroach a la The Fly, a sentient gelatinous blob known as B.O.B., a massive radioactive-mutated bug known as Insectosaurus, and the latest addition to their roster… Susan Murphy, a young woman from Modesto, California, who, after being randomly struck by a meteor on her wedding day, grows 49 feet and 11 inches tall*, thus earning her the nickname ‘Ginormica’ from the government.  

(*DreamWorks’ way of avoiding copyright infringement in its parody of the 1958 sci-fi horror flick Attack of the 50 Foot Woman)

The film originally started out as an adaptation of a 1981 comic published by Warren Publishing known as Rex Havoc: Raiders of the Fantastic, which follows the titular Rex, a monster hunter who leads a team of monsters in a fight against aliens. Gradually, the film moved away from being a direct adaptation of the comic once Vernon and Letterman came on board and they ultimately reworked its plot into what we know it as today. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this film’s production is that, thanks in large part to a $15 million budgetary increase, it became DreamWorks’ first film to be released in theaters in the 3-D format right around the time that 3-D films were starting to experience the major revival that they went through in the 2010’s. Now, obviously, this wasn’t the first production from a major studio to be released in 3-D during this timeframe; films like Beowulf and Journey to the Center of the Earth were given highly publicized 3-D releases before it and Disney had found much success back in 2006 when they debuted a 3-D version of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Nevertheless, it was very much the most prominent aspect of Monsters vs. Aliens’ marketing and, sure enough, that’s exactly how I ended up seeing it in theaters. And while it’s obviously been such a long time since that viewing, I generally recall its 3-D effects to be quite good. As I’ve mentioned in previous DreamWorks Retrospective posts, while I didn’t end up seeing the likes of How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek Forever After, or Puss in Boots in 3-D, I’m well-aware that DreamWorks’ 3-D efforts were often cited as being some of the best examples of the medium, especially since this was right around the time where many studios were starting to hastily convert a bunch of their 2-D-produced films into 3-D releases, often to not-so-great results.

But what about the film itself? While it did garner solid reviews from critics, some felt that it didn’t quite live up to its full potential as a love letter to 50s-era B-movies since it didn’t try to match those films fully on a narrative or stylistic level. And to be fair, I’d say that this is a valid argument as the film’s cultural nods to the works of a bygone era are just that… nods that younger audiences might not pick up on. However, the film more than makes up for this by being one of the most hilarious films to come out of DreamWorks Animation, with a non-stop array of funny quips and satirical jabs at how society would react to an alien invasion. Much of this film’s success with its humor is thanks to its top-notch voice cast. Will Arnett, Hugh Laurie, and Seth Rogen are a phenomenally funny comedy trio as the boastful yet lethargic Missing Link, the ‘totally not a mad scientist’ Dr. Cockroach Ph.D., and the dimwitted yet lovable B.O.B., respectively. Meanwhile, Kiefer Sutherland and Stephen Colbert are memorably hysterical as the hilariously jingoistic General W.R. Monger and the recklessly dimwitted President (you know, back when the idea of an incompetent President was considered inconceivable) and Reese Witherspoon is her usual perky and adorable self as Susan, who is easily one of DreamWorks’ most sympathetic protagonists given everything that happens to her.    

When it comes to being one of DreamWorks’ many franchises, Monsters vs. Aliens didn’t become as big as the likes of Shrek or Kung Fu Panda but, at the same time, still managed to fare a lot better than the likes of DreamWorks’ other one-off features of the 2000’s like Shark Tale or Over the Hedge. With a $381.7 million run at the box office under its belt, the film would go on to get a few spin-offs in the years following its release. There was a Halloween special, Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space, which aired on NBC later in 2009, a pair of animated shorts, 2009’s B.O.B.’s Big Break and 2011’s Night of the Living Carrots, that were released on various DreamWorks home media releases, and a 26-episode series that debuted on Nickelodeon in 2013… and was subsequently the final DreamWorks show produced for the network. However, it never ended up getting a proper film sequel, which, according to Jeffrey Katzenberg, was mainly due to it not faring as well overseas as it did in the States. But just like earlier when we talked about Over the Hedge’s unlucky fate as a one-off feature without any sort of onscreen follow-up, that shouldn’t be what ultimately defines Monsters vs. Aliens’ overall reputation as its sole feature film outing was an utter delight to revisit. Sure, it may not be the full-on tribute that it easily could’ve been to the classic genre films that inspired it, but with one of the most sharply comedic scripts to come out of any DreamWorks film up to this point, it more than succeeds in being an all-around zany and unabashedly irreverent sci-fi comedy.

Rating: 5/5!

And that’s where we’ll be ending today’s installment of Rhode Island Movie Corner’s DreamWorks Retrospective series. As always, thanks for following along and be sure to be on the lookout for the next installment of this series, where we’ll be delving into the films that DreamWorks produced between 2010 and 2017 (not counting anything we’ve already covered in any previous posts). In doing so, we’ll cover some of the studio’s most notable cult classics, conclude DreamWorks’ run of films that they produced for Paramount, and go through almost the entirety of the films that they made under the 20th Century Fox banner (which, again, doesn’t include anything that’s already been covered).

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Lilo & Stitch (2025) Review

The early 2000s were, admittedly, a rough period for Walt Disney Animation Studios. After experiencing one of the most successful runs in their history thanks to the Disney Renaissance, the studio quickly found itself having a far more difficult time achieving that same level of critical and commercial success once the new millennium rolled around. While there were various factors behind this turn of events, arguably the most prominent of the bunch was the rise in success of computer animated films that was spearheaded by the likes of DreamWorks and, of course, the studio that Disney had begun to partner with in the 90’s before buying them out wholesale in 2006, Pixar. As a result, a bunch of the films that Walt Disney Animation produced during this time, such as 2000’s The Emperor’s New Groove, 2001’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and 2002’s Treasure Planet, ended up faring poorly at the box office and, on occasion, with critics. Now, with that said, many of these films would later go on to attract considerable cult followings from the generation of kids who grew up with them, undoubtedly thanks in part to the creative risks that the studio often took during these years to deviate from their long-standing narrative formulas of reimagined fairy tales full of Broadway-esque musical numbers. Ultimately, though, it’s safe to say that there’s a very good reason as to why, in the mid-2000s, Disney Animation opted to move away from making traditionally animated films in favor of making computer-animated features. However, if there was one undeniable bright spot during these so-called ‘dark ages’, that would be the first of two films that the studio produced in 2002: a little offbeat sci-fi themed ‘Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride’ known as Lilo & Stitch.

Directed by the duo of Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who would later go on to co-direct DreamWorks’ highly acclaimed adaptation of How to Train Your Dragon in 2010 (which, on an incredibly ironic note given today’s review subject, is getting its own live-action remake in a few weeks), the film followed the adventures of its titular duo; Lilo, a young Hawaiian girl living under the care of her older sister Nani following the death of their parents, and her new pet dog Stitch. It’s just that, unbeknownst to Lilo and company, Stitch is secretly a destructive alien creature who was created by a mad scientist and is hiding out on Earth disguised as a dog to avoid being captured by intergalactic government forces. Unlike many of the other films that Disney Animation was producing at the time, Lilo & Stitch, which was the second of three films that were produced primarily from Disney’s now-defunct animation studio located within Walt Disney World’s Hollywood Studios theme park (the other two being 1998’s Mulan and 2003’s Brother Bear), was one of the studio’s cheaper productions from a budgetary standpoint. Whereas their other release of the year, Treasure Planet, was a costly $140 million flop, Lilo & Stitch only cost $80 million. And thanks in large part to a buzzworthy marketing campaign that saw Stitch wreak havoc across other Disney classics such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, the film performed quite well for itself critically and commercially, earning over $273 million while also garnering largely positive reviews from critics and an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. As a result, Lilo & Stitch would go on to spawn what is quite arguably the most expansive media franchise of any Walt Disney Animation film of the early 2000s.

Its most prominent spin-off was the animated TV series Lilo & Stitch: The Series, which ran for 65 episodes over the course of two seasons and debuted on September 20th, 2003, on ABC via Disney’s ABC Kids programming block. The series, which was preceded by a direct-to-video feature-length pilot film in Stitch! The Movie, followed the franchise’s titular duo as they went on various adventures across Hawaii to find and rescue the 625 experiments that Stitch’s creator, Dr. Jumba Jookiba, had created before he made Stitch AKA ‘Experiment 626’. During its run, the show notably pulled off one of the most ambitious crossovers in pop culture history by having not one, not two, not even three, but four whole episodes where Lilo & Stitch interacted with characters from some of Disney’s other hit shows at the time; Kim Possible, Recess, The Proud Family, and American Dragon: Jake Long. The show ultimately concluded in 2006 with another direct-to-video film, Leroy & Stitch, and during this time, the franchise also got another direct-to-video film in 2005, Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch has a Glitch, which, unlike the show, opted to be more of a direct sequel to the original film. After that, the franchise would go on to spawn another pair of television series; Stitch!, which ran for multiple seasons from 2008 to 2015, and Stitch and Ai, which was only a single-season show released in 2017. Unlike the bulk of the franchise’s media, however, these shows were considerably different in tone and execution, adhering more to the animation styles of the countries they were produced in (anime in the case of the Japanese-set Stitch! and donghua for the Chinese-set Stitch & Ai) and notably having Stitch paired up with new female protagonists instead of Lilo; Yuna in Stitch! and Ai in Stitch and Ai.

Simply put, there’s no denying that Lilo & Stitch is one of Disney’s most profitable IPs. Thanks to all the films, shows, merchandise, and numerous attractions at Disney theme parks (yes, that even includes the admittedly notorious Stitch’s Great Escape, which replaced the notoriously mature fan-favorite ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom), the franchise has earned nearly $3.5 billion worldwide which, according to recent reports from Disney, now makes it one of their Top 10 best-selling franchises. And because of all this, Stitch has become such a fan favorite in the eyes of Disney fans that it could even be argued that he could give Mickey Mouse a run for his money as one of Disney’s most beloved mascots. With all this in mind, I guess you can say that it was practically inevitable that Disney would attempt to make the original Lilo & Stitch the latest installment of its long line of animated classics to get a live-action remake. Thus, that’s where we are now with the live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch, which makes the 2002 original the latest in the Walt Disney Animation canon to get remade after the past few years of us getting remakes of most of the Disney Renaissance releases. In the director’s chair for this one is Dean Fleischer Camp, who had the breakout hit of his career in 2021 when he adapted Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, the trilogy of short films that he made with his then-wife Jenny Slate from 2010 to 2014, into a feature-length film that, despite being a live-action/animated hybrid, managed to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. With a background like that, it’s no wonder that Fleischer Camp imbues this new version of Lilo & Stitch with almost the same exact level of heart and soul as its animated counterpart, even with its rather controversial (yet, in several cases, effective) changes to the source material.     

In a far-off galaxy, the United Galactic Federation arrests mad scientist Dr. Jumba Jookiba (voiced/portrayed by Zack Galifianakis) for his illegal genetic experiments as exemplified by his latest creation, Experiment 626 (voiced by Chris Sanders), who is touted by Jumba as an indestructible force of nature. Immediately realizing the threat that 626 poses to the galaxy, the UGF Council promptly orders them both to be imprisoned; however, 626’s superior intellect helps him escape captivity and flee to another galaxy, where he ends up crash-landing on the planet Earth on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i. With both Jumba and the Galactic Federation’s Earth ‘expert’ Agent Wendell Pleakley (voiced/portrayed by Billy Magnussen) now on his tail as part of a deal that the former makes with the UGF’s Grand Councilwoman (voiced by Hannah Waddingham) so that he can avoid going to prison, 626 disguises himself as an Earth dog and is subsequently taken in by a young girl named Lilo Pelekai (Maia Kealoha), who has been living under the care of her older sister Nani (Sydney Agudong) following the death of their parents. Thanks in large part to Lilo’s troublemaking habits, Nani has struggled to be a proper caretaker for her sister, thus putting her in increasingly hot water with their family’s social worker, Mrs. Kekoa (Tia Carrere), who pushes for her to get her act together or else lose Lilo to child services. Naturally, this stressful situation is only exacerbated further by the arrival of 626, whom Lilo names ‘Stitch’, as the two sisters quickly discover that their new ‘dog’ is quite the handful.

Now, despite everything that we’re going to get into when it comes to its narrative changes, this new version of Lilo & Stitch still follows in the footsteps of practically all its fellow live-action Disney remakes by recreating several key sequences and iconic lines from its animated counterpart in live-action form. However, unlike something like the CGI-animated remake of The Lion King from 2019 where any changes made to its source material were arguably minimal at best, the Lilo & Stitch remake doesn’t end up feeling like nothing more than a ‘shot-for-shot’ remake of the original animated film as it does make a few noticeable changes to its story. And yet, as was seen with the 2020 remake of Mulan with its notable omissions of elements such as its music and characters like Mushu and Shang, this then leads to the exact opposite kind of reaction from those who question the need to remake an animated classic; one where, instead, fans of the original are angered by all the things that the remake leaves out that they find to be some of the original film’s best aspects. Sure enough, the remake of Lilo & Stitch has faced tons of scrutiny from fans of the original over the changes that it makes to its source material, such as the exclusion of one of the franchise’s most prominent villains and the subsequent re-working of a long-standing series protagonist into being this film’s main antagonist to make up for the lack of that other villain. However, what has easily been the most controversial change is this film’s reworked ending; without spoiling exactly what happens in it, many have argued that it betrays the original film’s key message stressing the importance and beauty of ‘ohana. After all, as Lilo famously declares in both versions of this story when Nani attempts to get rid of Stitch, “‘ohana means family and family means that no one gets left behind or forgotten”.

And yet… I don’t think that this film’s reworked ending is harmful to that theme. In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the criticism revolving around it seems to stem from those who only read about what happens and then proceeded to take it directly at face value without paying any attention to the key bits of narrative context surrounding it, which helps to convey the genuinely positive developments behind this turn of events. As a result, I’d say that this new ending still manages to convey the beauty of ‘ohana, even if it goes without saying that it goes about this in a drastically different manner than the original film. And more importantly, the remake does retain much of the same level of heart and soul as the original, much of which is, of course, thanks to its iconic titular duo. Stitch is still the same adorably chaotic dog-like alien that he’s been throughout the entire franchise, especially thanks to the pivotal move of having his longtime voice actor, none other than the original film’s co-director Chris Sanders, return to voice the character even if some of Stitch’s lines are clearly lifted directly from previous installments of the franchise. And while your mileage will most likely vary on how effectively this film translates the franchise’s alien characters into live-action (a recurring criticism of Disney’s recent live-action remakes), Stitch’s CGI design is easily one of the best instances of this being done. Then, on the human side of things, you have the utterly adorable Maia Kealoha, who shines in her film debut as she flawlessly exudes Lilo’s silly yet wholly sympathetic qualities.

But, of course, as any fan of this series will remind you, Lilo & Stitch is more than just the wacky escapades of its titular duo. Alongside the hilarious hi-jinx that ensue from Stitch pretending to be a dog, there’s also the emotional saga that is the relationship between Lilo and her sister Nani in the wake of their parents’ death as the latter works tirelessly to ensure that they stay together. In the case of the original film, this was one of the first major instances where a Disney film’s plot largely revolved around sisters more than a full decade before it was, admittedly, overshadowed by the billion-dollar juggernaut that was Frozen. And while the remake’s take on Lilo and Nani’s relationship does end up revolving around the aforementioned ‘reworked ending’, it’s still just as strong as it was in the original film and Sydney Agudong deserves just as much credit as Maia Kealoha’s been getting for her performance as Nani, especially thanks to the perfectly sweet on-screen camaraderie that she shares with Kealoha. All in all, the film succeeds in maintaining the strong characterizations of its three leads, and while this does mean that other recurring characters of the series don’t get as much to work with by comparison, everyone else in the cast is solid in their respective roles, such as Kaipo Dudoit as Nani’s good-natured love interest David and Courtney B. Vance as the enigmatic Cobra Bubbles, who’s reimagined here as a CIA agent investigating Stitch’s antics who only poses as a social worker (his role in the animated film) when he’s undercover. Meanwhile, Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen provide plenty of laughs as the bickering duo of Jumba and Pleakley and the film even features a few cameos from the stars of the original animated film. OG Nani Tia Carrere takes over Cobra Bubbles’ role as Lilo and Nani’s social worker Mrs. Kekoa while Amy Hill, who played the elderly shop owner Mrs. Hasagawa in the original film and TV series, plays Lilo and Nani’s eccentric yet kind-hearted neighbor Tūtū, who’s also David’s grandmother.

At this point, I’ve become the very definition of a broken record when it comes to my controversially positive stance toward Disney’s recent trend of live-action remakes. At the risk of rehashing the same exact statements that I’ve made in my other reviews of Disney’s live-action remakes, I don’t believe that these new films are ‘harmful’ to the legacies of their animated counterparts, mainly due to the alleged implication that they make them feel ‘lesser’ by comparison. Instead, I feel that, as long as the original films are still available to watch thanks to services like Disney+ (their controversial habit of removing content from the service notwithstanding), there’s nothing wrong with seeing new spins on these animated classics. And when it comes to Lilo & Stitch, I’d say that its live-action remake is one of the best of the bunch, even if many will undoubtedly argue that this isn’t saying much. Director Dean Fleischer Camp does a fantastic job of maintaining the exact same level of emotional poignancy as the original film, even when taking its polarizing (yet largely solid) narrative changes into account. On that note, as notorious as some of these changes have been in the eyes of Lilo & Stitch fans, they do, at least, help to give this film its own unique identity rather than it being just a straightforward retelling of the original animated film. But above all, with the dedicated efforts of both its cast and crew to honor its story’s Hawaiian roots on full display here, Lilo & Stitch succeeds in being just as delightfully hilarious as it is beautifully touching on an emotional level.

Rating: 5/5!

Saturday, February 8, 2025

Dog Man (2025) Review

In 1997, author Dav Pilkey would publish what would quickly become the breakout hit of his career, The Adventures of Captain Underpants. A kid-friendly send-up of the superhero genre, the book followed the daily adventures of best friends George Beard and Harold Hutchins, a pair of mischievous fourth graders who loved to pull pranks at their elementary school, especially if it came at the expense of their lousy teachers. When their notoriously cruel principal Mr. Krupp threatens to enact the most severe punishment imaginable on them, the two manage to get out of it by using a hypno-ring to coerce Mr. Krupp into believing that he is the hero of their self-produced comic book series, Captain Underpants, an underwear-themed superhero who’s “faster than a speeding waistband, more powerful than boxer shorts, and who can leap tall buildings without getting a wedgie”. Unfortunately, this ends up working a bit too well and Mr. Krupp starts going around trying to fight for “truth, justice, and all that is pre-shrunk and cottony” despite not having any actual superpowers, thus resulting in George and Harold having to go after him to keep him safe, especially once they start coming across actual supervillains like a bunch of sentient toilets and a mad genius with the unfortunate name of Pippy P. Poopypants.

Upon its release, the book quickly became a huge hit with readers, ultimately going on to spawn a franchise consisting of 12 mainline installments and multiple spin-offs that have collectively sold over 80 million copies worldwide. Granted, all this success has also come with a bunch of controversies, namely because of the books being some of the most consistently banned books in public libraries due to their juvenile sense of humor and anti-authoritarian nature, but that hasn’t stopped them from becoming beloved staples of the literary journeys of those who grew up with them. In 2017, the series was adapted into film by DreamWorks Animation, who had been looking to purchase the film rights to them ever since their debut in 1997. Eventually securing said rights in 2011, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, which was notably the last DreamWorks film produced under the 20th Century Fox banner after the studio was purchased by Universal the year prior, opted to be an amalgamation of the books (utilizing the origin story of the first installment and the main antagonist of the fourth, for example) rather than a straightforward adaptation of the first book. Upon its release, the film became both a critical and commercial hit, earning over $125 million worldwide. And in the eyes of Captain Underpants fans, the film was one of the most surprisingly faithful ‘book-to-film’ adaptations ever made, flawlessly replicating the artistic and narrative spirit of the books and even managing to adapt seemingly uncinematic aspects of the books to screen such as the ‘Flip-O-Rama’ segments where readers were encouraged to rapidly flip two pages back and forth to simulate action sequences.

One year prior to the film’s release, Dav Pilkey launched his next book series, Dog Man. Another spin-off of the Captain Underpants series, Dog Man is presented as the in-universe first comic series that George and Harold created together after they had first met in kindergarten (which, fun fact, was referenced as early as the original novel in 1997 as this was a character that Pilkey had conceived when he was in second grade). Following the conclusion of the mainline Captain Underpants series, the two rediscover their old Dog Man comics and decide to relaunch the series. Like the Captain Underpants books, the Dog Man books have been hugely successful critically and commercially, currently standing at 13 installments (with a 14th set to release later this year) with every installment being amongst the best-selling children’s books of their respective release years. And in 2020, DreamWorks began the process of bringing Pilkey’s latest hit series to the big screen, which brings us to this year’s Dog Man. Directorial duties for this one go to Peter Hastings, who has only directed one film prior (that being the… ‘infamous’ adaptation of Disney’s Country Bear Jamboree theme park attraction) but has had plenty of experience in both the world of animation, producing the likes of hit shows like Animaniacs, and the works of Dav Pilkey as he was one of the show-runners of the Captain Underpants film’s Netflix series spin-off The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants. With all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that, like its cinematic predecessor, Dog Man is another entertainingly goofy yet wholly sincere and genuinely faithful adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s beloved literary works.

In the bustling metropolis that is OK City, the local Police Chief (voiced by Lil Rel Howery) and his officers are constantly threatened by the inventions of the notorious evildoer Petey the Cat (voiced by Pete Davidson). The only two that have consistently been able to successfully thwart his plans are Officer Knight (voiced by director Peter Hastings), a highly decorated yet admittedly quite dimwitted police officer, and his loyal canine companion Greg (also voiced by director Peter Hastings), who’s clearly shown to be the smarter one of the two despite being a dog. Unfortunately, the duo end up getting critically injured when they’re unable to defuse one of Petey’s bombs, with Officer Knight suffering significant head injuries and Greg sustaining serious bodily injuries. As a way of saving them both, a pair of surgeons swiftly decide to transplant Greg’s head onto Officer Knight’s body, with the ensuing experiment resulting in the creation of a half-dog/half-human hybrid, Dog Man. Almost immediately, Dog Man becomes a beloved hero in the eyes of the people of OK City as he continues his ongoing crusade against Petey the Cat, who continues to enact all sorts of devious plans to take down his arch-nemesis, which includes everything from resurrecting one of Dog Man’s old foes, Flippy the Fish (voiced by Ricky Gervais) to creating his own clone, Li’l Petey (voiced by Lucas Hopkins Calderon) who, to Petey’s disappointment, turns out to be not quite as villainous as he is.

Now the first thing I should note about this film is that, despite everything that I’ve mentioned about its source material’s roots and connections to the Captain Underpants series, the film itself is not presented as the in-universe spin-off that it technically is. There’s no framing device that establishes it as the creation of George and Harold and the only major connection that it does share with Captain Underpants is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from the creators themselves. There’s not even a Flip-O-Rama sequence in this film despite the Dog Man books having them just like in the Captain Underpants books as that concept has been a staple of Dav Pilkey’s work since its debut in the original Captain Underpants novel. And yet, as neat as it would’ve been to see this film attempt to properly connect itself to the Captain Underpants series, I also recognize that it’s ultimately not that necessary for it to do so. Regardless of how much it does or doesn’t try to be a spin-off of its cinematic predecessor, Dog Man the film dutifully follows in the footsteps of the 2017 Captain Underpants film by being a highly respectful adaptation of its source material that faithfully adapts it not by being a direct 1:1 adaptation of its first installment but by seamlessly combining key story elements of multiple books into a singular narrative (Flippy the Fish? He’s the villain of the second book, Dog Man: Unleashed. Li’l Petey? He was introduced in Book 3, Dog Man: A Tale of Two Kittens.). All the while, the film also does a great job in capturing Pilkey’s well-established narrative sensibilities, resulting in a pleasantly light-hearted family-friendly comedy that’s unabashedly goofy. And while many of Pilkey’s biggest critics have often derided his work as being nothing more than a series of immature toilet jokes, I believe that, in doing so, they overlook the more subtly brilliant aspects of his writing, like his penchant for cleverly self-aware humor and simple yet delightfully wacky running gags.

Case in point, while Dog Man is a largely comedic endeavor, it’ll also take you by surprise by how it manages to throw in some genuinely heartfelt story beats. Much of this comes from the introduction of Li’l Petey who, as established earlier, doesn’t possess the same villainous tendencies that Petey has. Li’l Petey ends up forming a friendship with Dog Man over the course of the film, which then leads to Petey gradually starting to act less like a villain which, yes, is another way in which the film honors the books, where Petey turns into a hero by the end of the fifth book, Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas. The Captain Underpants film also had its fair share of heartfelt moments, which helps to exemplify why both these films, for as silly as they are, also have such a wholesome vibe to them while never having any moments that feel cynical or mean-spirited. Like Captain Underpants, Dog Man’s animation wasn’t an in-studio job (here, it was handled by Jellyfish Pictures whereas its predecessor was made by Mikros Image and Technicolor Animation Productions) but it still does a great job in replicating Pilkey’s trademark comic art style to make it all look like a comic book coming to life on-screen. Meanwhile, the film boasts a fun voice cast to play the franchise’s eclectic cast of characters, including Lil Rel Howery as Dog Man’s perpetually exasperated police chief, Isla Fisher as OK City’s most dedicated news reporter Sarah Hatoff, and Pete Davidson gleefully hamming it up as Petey.

I didn’t exactly imply it all that much throughout this review but I’m very much a part of the generation that grew up with the Captain Underpants books. Back in a time when I wasn’t fully aware of how controversial they were amongst certain groups (for, to be perfectly blunt, hilariously overblown reasons), I was thoroughly enthralled by their goofy yet subtly clever sense of humor and hugely entertaining stories that I’m confident were essential in me developing my love for the superhero genre back before I truly got into the likes of Marvel and DC. I eventually stopped reading the series regularly after its eighth installment, Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People, partially due to it leading to a six-year gap between book releases (albeit for the completely valid reason of Pilkey stepping away from writing to take care of his father David before he passed away in 2008) but mainly for the more standardized reason that applies to anything you enjoyed as a kid as I simply grew out of the series’ target demographic. However, that didn’t stop me from going to see the Captain Underpants film in 2017 which, ironically, was also the first DreamWorks Animation film that I’d seen in theaters in nearly a decade for… well, the exact same reason why I stopped reading the books. And for me, the result was not only one of DreamWorks’ best films but also one of my favorite films of that year. Despite not having read the books in quite a few years, I was pleasantly delighted by how surprisingly faithful the film was in adapting them to the screen even if that was largely done by way of it combining different story beats from multiple books in the series. No joke, I damn near cheered in the theater when the film managed to pull off an incredibly successful cinematic rendition of the series’ trademark ‘Flip-o-Rama’ segments.

Conversely, I do not have any sort of history with the Dog Man book series as it didn’t start coming out until 2016. This would’ve been a much different story had this new film been an adaptation of the Captain Underpants series’ original spin-off, The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, another in-universe comic by George and Harold about a newborn named Billy Hoskins who gains Captain Underpants’ super-powers, or a different Dav Pilkey series named Ricky Ricotta’s Mighty Robot, in which the titular mouse Ricky Ricotta befriends a giant robot as they team up to fight all sorts of intergalactic antagonists. Nevertheless, my nostalgia for the Captain Underpants series was ultimately enough to compel me to check out Dog Man’s film adaptation, and while I can’t say that it’s ‘as good’ as the 2017 Captain Underpants film (nor is it one of DreamWorks’ best, for that matter), it’s also one of those films that I’d argue is almost impossible to dislike. Not only does it do a fantastic job of being devotedly faithful to its source material but its wholly uncynical nature makes it a refreshingly positive animated flick that candidly wears its heart on its sleeve. As such, it’s clear that this film will be a smash hit with fans of the Dog Man series, undoubtedly destined to become a regular rewatch for the generation that will grow up with it, while still managing to appeal to older audiences who most likely aren’t familiar with the source material with its wacky sense of humor and vibrant animation. But perhaps best of all, this film’s success will assuredly make it another exemplary testament as to why Dav Pilkey continues to be an indisputable icon in the world of children’s literature.

Rating: 4/5