By Peter Lawrence Kane
It’s been a rough month for people who make cartoons. DreamWorks Animation just laid off 500 people out of a staff of 2,200, partly by shutting down its Redwood City studio altogether and consolidating the remaining employees in Southern California.
DreamWorks, founded by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg in 1994, originally hoped to rival Disney’s animators, who had come back from the wilderness only a few years earlier with The Little Mermaid. Starting with Antz (1998), DreamWorks has made some 30 feature films, including the Shrek, Madagascar, and Kung Fu Panda series, plus Wallace & Gromit, The Croods, and Monsters vs. Aliens, along with plenty of shorts and over a dozen kids’ TV shows.
The frenetic schedule of releasing three movies annually has proven too much, according to Variety, so DreamWorks is falling back to two per year, with a lot of outsourcing. (Home, about an alien invasion by cheerful, not-so-bright species, is coming out at the end of March. Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez, Jim Parsons, and Steve Martin voice the main characters.) Whether or not Home will hit that sweet spot by appealing to kids and adults remains to be seen, but the ailing studio clearly needs it. As the Verge put it, Dreamworks’ movies are floundering because “not enough people are seeing them.”
It’s too bad, too, and not just because artists bear the brunt of bad corporate decision-making, but also because the Bay Area’s other lauded animation studio (Pixar, in Emeryville) has arguably lost some of the cachet it had during the 2008–09 heyday, after WALL-E and Up blew everybody’s minds. Not to mention, Pixar only puts out a single film every year. But according to Pixar Recruiting’s Twitter feed, they’re hiring!
[h/t Cartoon Brew, Variety, The Verge] Image from DreamWorks
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