DreamWorks Animation

American company

Written byRobert Lewis

Fact-checked byThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Shrek, a green ogre, talks to Donkey in a sunflower field in a scene from the animated film Shrek.

Scene from the animated motion picture Shrek (2001), directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson.

Date:: 2004 - present

Headquarters:: Glendale

Areas Of Involvement:: film; Animation; television; 3-D; computer animation

DreamWorks Animation, American entertainment company producing animated feature films, original TV series and shorts, interactive media, live entertainment, theme park attractions, and consumer products. It is based in Glendale, California.

DreamWorks Animation originated as a division of DreamWorks SKG, a company founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen (the “S,” “K,” and “G” of the company name). Katzenberg, formerly the head of film and television production of the Walt Disney Company, took charge of the new company’s animated film production. In 2004 DreamWorks spun off DreamWorks Animation as an independent company, and Katzenberg stayed on as chief executive officer. In August 2016 the corporation was acquired by NBC Universal (also known as NBCUniversal), a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation, which was originally a cable television operator.

Owing to the slow pace of animated feature production, the first two DreamWorks Animation features were not released until 1998. The Prince of Egypt, a Biblical epic, was mostly made with traditional cel (or cell) animation technology, but the talking-insect story Antz was an early product of computer-generated animation. The company came to use computer animation exclusively for its own productions, but maintained for many years a partnership with Aardman, a British company that specialized in stop-motion clay animation. Starting with Monsters vs. Aliens (2009), DreamWorks Animation released all its feature films in 3-D, or stereoscopic, format.

Shrek (2001), a DreamWorks Animation film based on magazine cartoonist William Steig’s book about an eponymous lovable ogre, won the first Academy Award for best animated feature. That film and its sequels were box office hits, together grossing more than $1.2 billion in the United States alone. Shrek 2 (2004) was the highest-grossing film—of any type—in the United States during the year of its release. Other DreamWorks animated features that were successful enough to spawn at least one sequel included Madagascar (2005), Kung Fu Panda (2008), and How to Train Your Dragon (2010). The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), an Aardman film distributed by DreamWorks Animation, won the Oscar for animated feature in 2006.

DreamWorks Animation also supplied animated series to television networks and to streaming services such as Netflix. Many DreamWorks series—for example, The Penguins of Madagascar (2008–15) and Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness (2011–16)—are feature film spin-offs. In addition, theme park attractions based on the company’s films are found at a number of locations, including several parks run by Universal Studios.

Robert Lewis