DreamWorks... what the fuck?

How'd this happen? You're supposed to be the bad one, the D-student, the mouth-breather... Pixar's the good one. They've got the talent, the vision, the drive... and yet...



This movie's great! Not quite Kung-Fu Panda awesome, but miles ahead of the diarrhea Pixar's been spewing these last few years. While Wall-E operated under a contrived first-draft mess of a script, Panda was pristine and polished. Up was an improvement, but sold itself more on sentimentality than substance--I personally dislike Forrest Gump style "cry now" moments that are so blatantly manipulative they smokescreen the shallowness ("We pulled your heart strings with that montage!" the Pixar writer cackles, "You're ours now! Bwahahaha haha hahahaha ha ha").

I looked up the Dragon people on IMDB, thinking there's gotta be some magician here at work, some mastermind at DreamWorks churning out the good ones (the diamonds peaking out from the overwhelming pile of sloppy Shrek and talking animal garbage); a Brad Bird type (the man responsible for the Incredibles and, my personal favorite CG film of all time, Ratatouille).

Nope. Directing the film though, I did find Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, the men responsible for writing and directing my favorite Disney 2D film, Lilo & Stitch. But with Kung-Fu Panda, I didn't find anyone at the helm tethered to any previous big-name awesome project that I fuckin' adored.

These movies are exactly what's in my mind when I criticize the shit out of 'kids' films'. Yeah, their target demo might be children, but that doesn't mean the rules of good writing, directing, production don't apply. Films are films are films and there are rules.

I know that's controversial to say (ooooooohhhh art can't be put in a box), but it's the truth. Think about language, for instance. Whether you're from Potatoville, Idaho, Dixie, Alabama, New York, LA, London, Sydney, or even if you're one of those apes they taught how to communicate through sign language (and someone's miming this to you right now), you're still speaking English. "Ya'll dun talk real good." "Thou speakest with much clarity, sir." "*signsignsign*" There are a ton of ways to express the same thing, tons of ways to warp the thought, to personalize it. But ultimately, the expression has to obey certain axioms of communication to be intelligible. This isn't grammar, it's not even spelling ("wuz up?" "r u ok?"), it's something even more basic.

So whether you're disgusted by the idea or not, there is something called "good writing", "good film making", "good story teling".

I'm glad there are people out there still trying, still making stuff they should be proud to put their name on, regardless of "target demographic".