Dreamworks Dumps Wallace and Gromit

Tiger4 writes "Aardman Animation and Dreamworks are splitting their relationship. Apparently Dreamworks feels they lost money on 'Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were Rabbit' and 'Flushed Away.' So off to their separate ways they go. Aardman is going back to stop motion and clay, Dreamworks will be staying with their CGI ways." In addition, Aardman Animation announced that a new Wallace and Gromit film is in the works.

Dreamworks is dead

[Bacon Bits]

Sorry, but Dreamworks is just a name now. SKG sold out quite awhile ago.

Re:I say

[DarkLegacy]

Funny, I didn't know that Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were Rabbitway featured any CG. It seemed like it was claymation to me. Just shows how realistic CG gets nowadays.

Re:I say

[clickclickdrone]

Good points although as Mark Kermode (UK film critic) noted, one of the strengths with clay as opposed to CGI is the quality of lighting and in the main, the lighting in the W&G movie was superb. CGI state of the art is damn fine but you can't beat 'real' light for making a scene look good.

Purple and Brown

[ettlz]

The British psyche has long had a soft-spot for all things Aardman and their distinct style of claymation, coupled with quintessentially UKian humour. Check out this example [youtube.com] and the many others from those unflappable blobs.

Re:I say

[jimicus]

There was an article in a local newspaper interviewing Nick Park (his company's based in Bristol, UK) - he said that while he liked the flexibility CGI offered him, he didn't like working with a US team as communication was difficult and they lost too much control over the end result.

I think this is just Dreamworks trying to gloss over that by announcing that it didn't make them any money so they want out.

Re:I say

[suv4x4]

CGI is developing though, I've seen some stuff in the past three, four years that really captured a lot, if not all of the feel of some traditional animation techniques; something that wasn't the case previously. In a few years time, who knows how things will have progressed?

Indeed, the movements and expressions have improved immensely in CGI features. This exact thing has made a great impression to me too.

Before we had those simple math based smooth artificial moves (and we still see them on amateur movies around the net), and now it's obvious the guys mastered the art perfectly.

I used to feel bad for traditional animation since I felt way too much is lost in the transition to 3D. The gap is narrowing every day though (of course I still love Hayao Miyazaki's movies and want more of them).

Re:Lost money on 'Curse of the Were Rabbit?

[Aladrin]

Flushed Away didn't have that 'Wallace and Gromit' feel to it that even Chicken Run had. The video, the audio, the plot... All of it -felt- different.

Don't get me wrong. I love the movie and so did my entire family.

But if you advertise something as 'from the creators of Wallace and Gromit' you've put an image into peoples' heads before they've even seen the movie. No matter how good it is, if it doesn't match that image, they'll be somewhat disappointed.

Having said that, I think the real issue was that they spend 5x too much money making the movie. Why spent an extra $120mil if you're just going to imitate the $30mil version? It's crazy. Even if you gross $500mil, you've STILL wasted $120mil no matter how you look at it.

Re:Gromit

[lordmoose]

Um, the USA still loves Ardman too. Not everybody over here just blindly takes their kids to any CGI crapfest that happens to be playing. I took my daughter and niece to see COTWW in the theater and they loved it.

Re:Smart Move?

[shess]

*Shrug*. I like Shrek and Shrek 2 a great deal, but they _are_ just a series of set pieces strung together which only works due to the casting. For the most part, Pixar creates pretty amazing movies which feel greater than the sum of their parts in many ways. That doesn't mean that Dreamworks absolutely sucks, it's just a differe style.

It's like Disney versus Warner Brothers. Initially, Warner Brothers was cheap and wanna-be, but over time they really came into their own by developed a cutting wit which simply wasn't present in the Disney pieces. I don't think Dreamworks is there yet, but it could happen.

Re:I say

[MsGeek]

Dreamworks basically has as much clue with regard to Aardman as Disney has with Studio Ghibli: NONE.

Dreamworks buried both Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Flushed Away. They had NO IDEA how to promote the movies, and basically threw up their hands and said "OMG it's too British." They also took Innocence: Ghost In The Shell II and buried it. That was a freaking impressive movie on a big screen. It just doesn't have the same impact on your TV.

Same with Disney. They have buried all of the movies they released for Studio Ghibli. They made more of a noise for Valiant than Howl's Moving Castle.

I think that both Dreamworks and Disney see Aardman and Ghibli product respectively as DVD fodder. I suspect that Miyazaki-sensei will be the next one to take his ball and play elsewhere. The Aardman move was in the works even before Flushed Away was released. Aardman was ticked, to say the least, about how Were-rabbit was released.

Re:I say

[openaddy]

To my eyes the CG in "Flushed Away" wasn't convincing clay at all. When I saw the commercial for "Flushed Away" for the first time, my immediate thought was, "Hey, some CG company stole the Aardman's design!" I even told this to a friend who's a huge W&G fan. I found out later that Aardman's gone CG. There's something about the texture and the lighting in "Flushed Away" (and other CG stuff) that immediately screams "CG!!" Having said that, the CG in "Wererabbit" was very well mixed in and difficult to pick out. I actually wondered how they made the little rabbits float in the air by claymation..

Re:Gromit

[dr00g911]

I think a distinction needs to be made between the PDI campus and Dreamworks proper -- Dreamworks actually has two separate CG animation houses. PDI/Dreamworks is the one that produces Shrek & Madagascar (halfway decent), while the other Dreamworks campus has been responsible for Antz, Shark Tale, Over the Hedge, and a multitude of other crapfests.

As an animator, the level of craftsmanship, timing & pacing in Madagascar was pretty noteworthy. They pushed the CG animated medium pretty far with huge amounts of squash & stretch, smears and exaggeration. Disclaimer: I know a couple of guys that work on the PDI campus.

That's not to say that I don't long for old school claymation and traditional 2D sometimes, but the end result is slowly becoming more about the artists involved than the tools they use if you've got a good crew and director.

I'm both happy and sad to see Aardman more away from Dreamworks, though. They'll get even less exposure in the US, but they won't have a big US corporate megalith to report to, watering down their unique style and humor.

Thank god

[SubcomandanteTorta]

I've been nothing but disappointed with Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar for quite a while - they're like autophagous cannibal machines, endlessly devouring themselves and their own Hollywood culture, vomiting up ersatz ambergris and defecating marketing material.

Disney's the worst offender, mining myths and legends in the public domain since the dawn of their existence, keeping everything and giving nothing back, extending copyright law into infinity to protect their stupid fucking Mouse. I'm glad they're mostly eating themselves, now.

Curse of the Were-Rabbit had a lot of pop culture references, but never lost itself. The Iron Giant was an incredible film, but I can't say I liked the Incredibles in the same way. Both were comparatively unsuccessful.

People love crap.