Dreamworks

Quick Notes: Shrek & Fox’s NFT Hype

This is just a quick note on two topics that I can’t let pass by but which I don’t have enough to say to warrant a full post.

Shrek


It’s 20 years old and no, I can’t believe it. The film came out just at that awkward point in your life when you’re too old for kids stuff and a bit too young to appreciate more mature fare. I went to see it anyway and I’m glad I did.

The Guardian posted a review by Scott Tobias that’s decidely unflattering but it misses the point entirely. Yes, Shrek doesn’t look so great in hindsight given everything it spawned, but at the time it was groundbreaking.

For the decade prior, all that audiences had were Disney’s renaissance and Pixar’s golden age and that’s not really a choice. Almong comes Shrek with two very important qualities: 1. it goes in the opposite direction and, 2. it mercilessly pokes fun at Disney’s films.

That second aspect was something new to most audinces which made it incredibly fresh while painting the old classics in an entirely new light. Disney themselves had to admit as much and produced films such as Disenchanted and Tangled in the years following Shrek.

From this vantage point, the films holds up rather well. It’s place in animated history was assured a long time ago (despite Mike Myers’ atempts at a Scottish accent).

FOX Hypes an NFT show

Yup, I’m scratching my head too. The news was announced at an upfront which probably tells you everything you need to know.

If you’re reading this post, it’s already too late to get into NFTs. The hype train sailed over a month ago and it sure isn’t going to hang around for this show to be produced.

As for the entire concept, I sort of get it? I think FOX is placing a bit too much faith in the idea that fans will pony up for exclusive content and bragging rights to owning pieces of a show. Cels and original art has been around forever and owning the only copy of something is quite a bit different from owning a receipt that says you own it.

It’s all part of the broader attempt to exploit the value of digital goods which by their nature, have no real value since they can be infinitely and perfectly replicated for extremely little cost. NFTs are just the latest trendy way of doing so. I don’t hold out much hope that this show is described in the future as groundbreaking.

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How to Train Your Dragon 2: When Animated Films No Longer Appear Animated

How to Train Your Dragon 2 has been one of the most anticipated films of the year. The massive sleeper hit that was the original, made out quite well back in 2010 thanks to its brilliant blend of story, animation, and character; setting a new bar for a DreamWorks film and proving that they had the chops to match Pixar if given the chance. Fast forwarding a few years, and after viewing the sequel, I came away with the feeling that although inferior to the original, there was something else that bothered me about How to Train Your Dragon 2.

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Does Pixar Really Have a Technological Advantage?

There’s an annual report called the Global Animation Industry Report: Strategies, Trends & Opportunities. I wrote about it last year, but since there’s a new report for 2014, I’m writing about it again. While the $5,000 price is a bit too steep for me, you can view the contents online for free, and that’s where one sub-heading picqued my interest: ‘Pixar’s Technological Advantage’. While that may have been true many years ago, does it still hold up?

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Using The Croods to Explore Necessary Changes In Key Art

Marketing and promotional art is a key piece of the entertainment puzzle and has been a feature of the promotion business since long before film. Film posters are an art in and of themselves, but as Bill Cunningham points out in a guest post over at Truly Free Film, they haven’t kept up with the times.

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Why Is Animation Like Software?

Software seems like a funny thing to compare animation to, doesn’t it? After all, one is mostly recreational and the other is, well, mostly utilitarian. Yet there are many common traits between the two, especially now that both are expected to be given away for free. Thankfully, someone has already figured out a way to make money from software.

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DreamWorks Are About Much More Than Their Features

Scott Mendelson is quite prolific on the animation front this weather. First he qualified his statement that American feature animation is, for all intents and purposes, a genre. Secondly, he’s written a rather substantive piece (again for Forbes) on DreamWorks Animation and their “complicated legacy”. Is he right though? Here’s a look at why DreamWorks legacy is actually about much more than their films.

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AwesomenessTV Proves Its A Winner

AwesomenessTV

About a year ago, I pondered which animation-based YouTube channel would succeed. Still later I looked at whether or not AwesomenessTV was the prototype for YouTube channels. I wrote at the time that:

If AwesomenessTV can create a viable funding model and retain an audience, we might have a winner on our hands.

As it turns out, I was right! The company has just been snapped up by DreamWorks Animation for at least $33 million.

The deal is an important one for a number of reasons but the chief one to take away is that this is a serious investment in terms of both audience and talent on the part of DreamWorks.

On the talent side, AwesomenessTV has a subscriber base of 14 million 500,000 up from a comparatively paltry 11,000 in just 9 months. That’s truly explosive growth and it’s natural that DWA will want to have a front row seat in that. Secondly, acquiring the team behind the channel will ensure that its growth is imbued with the same hands that have guided it so far. A wise decision on the part of DreamWorks.

The audience side is where the real investment is though. With 14 million consumers and a direct line to them, DreamWorks stands to exponentially increase its exposure. The hidden fact is that you can expect a lot of data to flow up from those subscribers which leads us nicely to the truly intriguing (and overlooked) aspect to the deal.

Teenagers!

Yes, teenagers! AwesomenessTV is aimed directly at them and I will eat my hat if the vast majority of their subscriber base aren’t in their awkward years or damned close to them. You know which other animation studios actively court teenagers? None! Disney tends to ignore teens in favour of the more moldable tweens, Nickelodeon doesn’t put a profound effort into anybody above the age of 12, Cartoon Network is just about the only network that has a presence in the teen market thanks to [Adult Swim], but they have no theatrical film division. Oother large-scale animation studios like Sony, Blue Sky, etc. play similar games; they all cater to younger audiences only.

Is Jeffrey Katzenberg subtly attempting a coup d’état of sorts of the teen market with animation? It’s certainly possible. AwesomenessTV has a history of animated content and animation is what DWA is good at, so it would seem reasonable to see the former leverage the high quality content of the latter and for both to grow their audiences as a result.

Going even further, you could parlay those teenage animation fans into adult animation fans. That’s not a far stretch especially given that the animation age ghetto currently occupies the very age group that AwesomenessTV caters to.

How will it pan out? It’s hard to say, but I was right before so can only hope that I’m right again 🙂

Your thoughts?

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