The 10 Best DreamWorks Films Ranked, from ‘Shrek’ to ‘The Wild Robot’

In 1994, Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg resigned from the company and teamed up with Steven Spielberg and music executive David Geffen to form DreamWorks SKG, which later was rechristened DreamWorks Animation. Its first feature film, released four years later, was “Antz,” a brash, adult-oriented CGI production about a worker ant struggling to stick out in the communal colony he slaves away in. The film was successful — it was the first non-Disney animated movie to gross $100 million worldwide — but it was also overshadowed by comparisons to “A Bug’s Life,” Pixar’s film released that year which also focused on a misfit ant trying to save his ant colony.

That beginning encapsulates the perception of DreamWorks Animation in a nutshell — as the decidedly less ambitious, less artful cousin to Pixar. And it’s hard to say that reputation is totally unearned. DreamWorks is responsible for many lazily constructed, irritating animated movies, from “Shark Tale” to the “Trolls” franchise to the existential horror that is the “Boss Baby” film series. Its worst movies often seem on autopilot, relying on referential humor and massively star-studded casts to carry stories that don’t have much heart.

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But DreamWorks, over just a 26 year history, has developed a wide variety of films that go beyond just the loud, annoying comedy they’re often associated with; and often that loud, annoying comedy can be genuinely good, as can be seen in the better “Shrek” films. Their early 2D animated films, from epic “The Prince of Egypt” to fizzy comedy “The Road to El Dorado,” are delights, and the early Aardman Animation films they helped produce and distribute are equally wonderful. And every so often, a DreamWorks film comes around with a real storytelling perspective that makes them sing, like the “How to Train Your Dragon” movies or the early “Kung Fu Panda” films. DreamWorks latest is also one of their best: based on a novel by Peter Brown, “The Wild Robot” tells an ecological story of a robot turned protector of a small island, with gorgeous animation and a heartwarming moral about parenthood making for one of DreamWorks most nakedly emotional works.

With “The Wild Robot” in theaters now, IndieWire is revisiting the best of DreamWorks’ output. The list includes both their modern 3D animated output, their 2D work from the early 2000s, and the claymation films that they distributed and produced in partnership with Aardman Animations. We also limited ourselves to one representative for every franchise DreamWorks produces. Read on for the 10 best DreamWorks movies, ranked.

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