You
might not have realized it yet, but How
To Train Your Dragon 3 is out in theaters, like, right now, and it’s
good. It’s really good. It’s about as perfect an ending to the story
and character arcs set up in the first movie, all the way back in 2010, that we could have wished for.
In
fact, Dreamworks Animation has proven remarkably good over the years at making bizarre
premises work. But in a world where
Marvel is still the go-to standard for multiple-film continuities and Pixar is
still the guiding standard for animation, I feel the quality of Dreamworks has
so far gone tragically overlooked, and with the final HTTYD experience about to
leave theaters for good, it might be too late for us to give them their
due.
Now,
this is not to get too ahead of myself and suggest Dreamworks is some
Ghibli-level bastion of near-perfect filmmaking, because it isn’t. When looking at the three dozen films thus
far released under the Dreamworks banner, there is very much an uneven mix in
terms of quality; I would rank just under half the titles on the scale between “really
solid” and “genuinely great.” The others,
though….I mean, Boss Baby wasn’t literally the worst film ever, but,
still.
Even
the franchises have as many lows as they do highs; the first two Shrek movies were genuinely
groundbreaking events in American animation that redefined the genre, and Madagascar was…fine, I guess, but those
two franchises soon fell off particularly steep cliffs and stayed around well
past their sell-by dates. Still, though,
it’s amazing to me when I think about how many great movies there are here that
no one seems to be talking about anymore; for every Boss Baby or Over the Hedge,
there’s a Prince of Egypt, a Chicken Run, or even the lone Wallace and Gromit feature. And for the most part, while most of these
movies did well enough at the box office, recognition has never went much
beyond that; Shrek and Wallace and Gromit remain the only two
Dreamworks films to ever nab an Oscar, while Kung Fu Panda and HTTYD have (so far) been completely shut
out.
And
yet, despite this ongoing travesty, the makers of two of the best film trilogies
post-LOTR have kept right on going, quietly and competently crafting excellent
stories out of material that really, truly, should not be this good. Jack Black as a fat panda who stumbles into
mastering kung fu and a series about dragons with remarkably bizarre designs
where the human characters can’t decide if they're Scottish or American are
decidedly NOT the sort of foundations most people would look at and say, “Yep,
that’s trilogy material!” Yet here we
are; Kung Fu Panda and HTTYD not only
rank among the best franchises of the century (so far), I am inclined to argue
that they are the best two animated trilogies every produced within the US,
period.
Why,
yes, I would have been happy include Toy
Story in that discussion, if Pixar were not so determined to take all the
goodwill the third film generated and throw it off a fucking cliff.
So
how did it happen? Why did these two series
turn out so good, succeed where so many others fail? I’ll take deeper looks at the films
themselves in two later posts, but in broad terms, the connective thread
between them is pretty clear; in both cases the studio handed the reigns to a
talented, creative team that knew what stories they wanted to tell, and gave
them just enough leeway to make those stories with no really disruptive
interference from above.
Let’s start with Kung Fu Panda; the primary tissue connecting all three movies are
the screenwriters, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who penned all three
scripts. Melissa Cobb and Clare Knight are
also credited on all three as, respectively, the producer and head editor. John Stevenson and Mark Osborne split
directing duties for the first movie, with Jennifer Yuh Nelson taking over for
the second (the first time a woman of any background solely directed a feature
animated film), and then sharing credit on the third movie with Alessandro
Carloni.
HTTYD,
on the other hand, had Dean DeBlois as the central animating force behind its
production, as he shares writing AND directing credits on all three films (with
Bonnie Arnold producing all three); for the first one, he split the work with
Will Davies and Chris Sanders, while he wrote and directed the next two on his
own, and has already gone on record with how his own familial struggles shaped
the narrative he wanted to build around Hiccup.
Both
are also enhanced throughout by killer scores; the Kung Fu Panda music comes courtesy of Hans Zimmer. John Powell contributed to the first two of
those films as well, but he clearly reserved his A-Game for HTTYD, providing us
with one of the best musical creations of the past decade.
Furthermore,
it’s clear that none of these were rushed productions; each installment had at
least three years between the others. It
would have been all too easy to look at the respective success of the first
films and rushed through sequels within a year or two, the animating force
behind such decisions usually being a fear that, if you don’t hurry, people
will forget all about your last movie and not care about the second one. That this so clearly dominates a lot of
thinking within Hollywood is rather sad, because it belies an ignorance of one
of the basic truths of filmmaking; if you make a genuinely good product and
stick by it, the audience will come. And
your chances of achieving this are all the higher when you really take your
time to make each movie something special, and not just carbon copies of what
came before, as so, so many sequels end up being.
Both
of these franchises have born this out; all three Kung Fu Panda films had
budgets in the 130-150 million range, and each pulled in well over half a
million in global box office, a solid, if not overwhelming, profit margin. The budget for HTTYD, I was shocked to find
out, has actually decreased with each successive movie, dropping from 165
million for the first movie to under 130 million for The Hidden World. This,
despite how clearly and amazingly the quality of the animation has risen with
each new installment. The first two
movies likewise hit or topped half a million; the third is still out,
obviously, but it’s well on track to making a comparable amount to the second
movie.
Clearly,
my worries that we still aren’t fully appreciated these movies aside, they
stand as clear rebuffs to the idea that sequels have to be rushed to make a
profit; there were enough people who could enjoy these films for what they are,
and remembered to get excited and get out the door when the next one came
around.
So
let’s take some time, then, to look back at these two trilogies, and appreciate
what we’ve got. And I promise, the next
two installments will not take three years apiece to finish.
I
hope.
-Noah Franc
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