DreamWorks Animation is a major American animation studio founded by Steven Spielberg, former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and
music mogul David Geffen in 1994 that is best known for films such as its Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda and How To Train Your Dragon series. Financially their films have alternated between highly successful hits and costly flops that have undermined their ability to remain independent. As DreamWorks Animation became increasingly aware of the unpredictable nature of relying on big film releases, in 13 they signed a deal with Netflix to provide cartoon series material for their service in territories such as America and Europe while also broadcasting on The DreamWorks Channel in Asia. Yet this was not enough to secure their independence. In April 16 NBC Universal bought DreamWorks Animation for $3.8 billion
¹. Although the studio's founder Jeffrey Katzenberg remained head of DreamWorks New Media, the studio was now controlled by Illumination's CEO Chris Meledandri. NBC Universal hoped that the popularity of DreamWorks Animation particularly in China, a country emerging as a more important financial market than the United States, would be beneficial especially as they were constructing a Universal Studios theme park in Beijing.

A list of the films that DreamWorks Animation made between 2015
and 2019 is listed below. Characters and actors in Bold appear in other, related films. Also mentioned is whether the films pass the
Bechdel Test. This can be summarised as
whether the film involves two or more female characters who have a
conversation together that does not focus on men in general or specific male characters.

31. Home (2015)

An eccentric and visually unique take on the story of an
unlikely friendship between two quite different characters. The film is full of other science-fiction film references and Jim Parsons excels as Oh, despite the unusual hit-and-miss dialogue he is given. That the film's star character is a (reasonably) realistic non-white female is also a positive step hinting at hopefully more diversity in DreamWorks Animation's films in the future.

32. Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)

Kung Fu Panda 3 was co-produced with DreamWorks Animation and Oriental DreamWorks, a company partnered with Chinese film companies based in Shanghai that had been created to open up the
potentially lucrative Chinese market. This was formed when DreamWorks purchased Chinese animation studio 37 Entertainment and received investment from China Media Capital, Shanghai Media Group and Shanghai Alliance Investment to become one of the few western companies able to import Western films into China. Approximately a third of the film was made in China. This meant that the film was allowed to be shown in China, which was its biggest audience, making more money there than in the United States.

Kung Fu Panda 3 was the fourth most successful animated film of the year, behind Pixar's Finding Dory, Disney's Zootopia, Illumination
Entertainment's The Secret Life of Pets.

33. Trolls (2016)

Insanely happy musical film full of songs and dance with
The important underlying message that cannibalism doesn't create happiness. This
successfully reinvents the Dam Troll dolls invented by Thomas Dam in
1959. The story is similar in places to Chicken Run, with the idea that a female
antagonist wishes to profit by cooking the heroes, yet this does not
detract from the film at all. There is even a nod to the fact that
the story is based on a toy range.

Trolls was the ninth most successful animated film of the
year, behind Pixar's Finding Dory, Disney's Zootopia,
Illumination Entertainment's The Secret Life of Pets, DreamWorks Animation's Kung Fu Panda 3, Disney's Moana, Blue Sky's Ice Age: Collision Course, Illumination's Sing and Columbia's The Angry Birds Movie. A sequel, Trolls World Tour, was released in 2020.

34. Boss Baby (2017)

An enjoyable film based on the simple idea of having a baby talking like a managerial adult. While it is clear at all times exactly where the film is heading, this doesn't matter as the journey is so enjoyable. The use of 'Blackbird', one of Sir Paul McCartney's finest compositions, is particularly emotional. Wizzie the Gandalf alarm clock is by far the finest alarm clock in animation history, and is a reminder that actor Miles Christopher Bakshi is the grandson of Ralph Bakshi, who directed the phenomenal animated The Lord of the Rings (1979).

35. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017)

This was the last film DreamWorks Animation made that was distributed by th Century Fox, though released after DreamWorks Animation was acquired by Universal Pictures. It has a much simpler,
cheaper animation style that is quite different to other DreamWorks
Animation films - it is stylised and similar to Pilkey's novel's
artwork. The animation was outsourced to independent animation studios Mikros Image in Canada and Technicolor Animation Productions in France while DreamWorks Animation was restructured.

Jerome Horwitz, the name of the school, was the name of Curly from The Three Stooges and the film was influenced by the films of John Hughes.

The film was DreamWorks Animation's lowest grossing since Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas in 2003. It was the ninth most successful animated film of the year, behind Illumination's Despicable Me 3, Pixar's Coco, DreamWorks Animation's
The Boss Baby, Pixar's Cars 3, Warner Bros' The
Lego Batman Movie, Blue Sky's Ferdinand and even behind
both Sony Pictures Animation films, The Emoji Movie and
Smurfs: The Lost Village. The poor performance may possibly
be explained as since 1997 the Captain Underpants series has been the most complained-about book series in American libraries due to the unrelenting, explicit toilet humour content. Consequently, of
the three films DreamWorks Animation had in production to release in
18, only How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World avoided
being cancelled. It was delayed until 19 instead, leaving 2018 the
first year since 1999 in which no DreamWorks Animation film was released.

36. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)

This was the first DreamWorks Animation film to be released under
new owners Universal Pictures. A return to form, How to Train
Your Dragon: The Hidden World was the fourth most successful
animated film of the year² behind Disney's Frozen II, Pixar's Toy Story 4 and China's Beijing Enlight Pictures film Ne Zha. How to Train Your Dragon is the first animated series in which all three films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, although none of the series have actually won.

Following accusations of sexual assault and making fake bomb
threats, TJ Miller was dropped from the voice cast and Justin Rupple
was cast as Tuffnut.

37. Abominable (2019)

A visually impressive film with a predictable plot, it was the
first film co-produced with the newly-independent Pearl Studio. This
had been Oriental DreamWorks, DreamWorks' Chinese animation studio.
In 2018 NBC Universal sold Oriental DreamWorks to avoid a Chinese anti-trust investigation. The Chinese government thought that the
US-controlled Oriental DreamWorks was potentially too influential and threatened to dominate the Chinese market, despite having only released one film, Kung Fu Panda 3.

The film proved controversial as a brief scene at the start shows a map of China in the background including the 'Nine-Dash Line'. This is a line showing how much of the South China Sea that China lays claim to, despite the United Nations Convention of the Laws of the Sea's definition of what constitutes China's territorial waters, and so the film was banned in Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, countries whose territorial waters China claims with this line.

Abominable was the ninth most successful animated film of
the year behind Disney's Frozen II, Pixar's Toy Story 4, China's Beijing Enlight Pictures film Ne Zha, DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Illumination's The Secret Life of Pets 2, United Artist's The Addams Family, CoMix Wave and Toho's Weathering with You, and Warner Bros' The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. This was despite the release of comparatively similar films Warner's Smallfoot (2018) and Laika's Missing Link (2019).

The Future

The 10s ended with DreamWorks animation having regained a strong position in the animation marketplace as part of NBC Universal's media empire, yet the small degree of controversy with a Chinese-themed film was perhaps a foretaste of things to come. The following year the Covid-19 virus brought a deadly challenge no-one foresaw that disrupted the entire way of life of people all around the world. Universal NBC's response, to heavily promote home online video streaming instead of cinema, would cause controversy and calls for boycotts from cinema owners and questioned the very relationship
between films and cinemas in the challenging years ahead.