h
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Love Begins
No title available
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
ellievsbear
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
noise dept.
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
#extradirty
ojovivo
will byers stan first human second
Jules of Nature
RMH
Misplaced Lens Cap
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
sheepfilms
Keni
YOU ARE THE REASON
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
seen from Ireland
seen from Malaysia
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from Spain
seen from Malaysia
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@dreamworksdragonplush
Hi all! Welcome to my animation blog.
Here's where I share animation Hot Takes and the occasional news-y post. I'm not an animator, but I love animation as a medium and I love learning about animation technology, specifically.
Current highlighted posts:
Films I first watched in 2026 (suggest more via the ask box!)
Shrek 5 trailer analysis (and HTTYD animation technology recap)
Rise of the Guardians maps
DreamWorks is always like "here's a movie with a cheesy premise and a meh title pls watch it" only to(nine times out of ten) drop the most gorgeously animated film with incredible music, cinematography, and voice acting that lovingly embraces yet also pushes genre conventions and is genuinely funny until it punches you in the feels and I fall for it EVERY time
A ramble about sign language in feature animation
I want to preface this by saying that I am a hearing person (who has merely taken an introductory sign language course) and I'd love to hear some Deaf perspectives. Is it easy to understand? Does it feel natural? Is it visible enough on screen? Is it 'just pandering'? Should there be more of them? ...Are people going on about it too much? Please tell me your thoughts!
That said, I've been thinking about Disney's Songs in Sign Language and trying to figure out how I feel about it.
In case you haven't heard about this yet, Disney just released 3 songs that were entirely reanimated in ASL. No AI (I can't believe I have to specify that, but I suppose they deserve the suspicion after their whole Sora deal) - just a team of extremely skilled creatives. I think it's a really cool project, and a great thing to be releasing during (US) National Deaf History Month.
It's the brainchild of animator/director Hyrum Osmond, who struggled to connect with his Deaf father because he didn't learn sign language growing up. He pitched the idea to Disney and they approached Deaf West Theatre to create the custom choreography.
(Continued below the cut)
Disney is releasing 3 full music videos in ASL for National Deaf History Month!
(Above: the original, the ASL reference, and the new version.)
They worked with Deaf West Theatre (a nonprofit that performs musicals that are signed and sung at the same time) to create new choreography for pretty much the entirety of each song, and it took a team of 20 people to animate them.
(The songs they're adapting are We Don't Talk About Bruno from Encanto, The Next Right Thing from Frozen II, and Beyond from Moana 2.)
You can see a preview of all three videos here (along with some behind-the-scenes footage), and I also recommend reading this interview with the director, or reading Disney's own article below:
Three musical numbers from 'Frozen 2,' 'Encanto,' and 'Moana 2' are reimagined in American Sign Language with new character animation.
I greatly enjoyed Hoppers, but what I do wish was that it had done a bit More. Just generally.
I recognise that this is largely a taste thing (I like films that are really committed to their style, like The Bad Guys and The Wild Robot), but I feel like I keep trying to explain what Hoppers is like to people by coming up with other animated film comparisons and then having to stop myself. They all feel like they're way too extreme.
I don't think it's a case of it not knowing what it wants to be, or a result of it being created 'by committee' (like Frozen II), or of corporate censorship, but just that it's going for a sort of generic action-comedy vibe. Which is definitely unique within the world of Pixar, but doesn't really make it stand out in the larger animated film world
i wish i was a more articulate person, but I have to say that I love how Hoppers is led by a female character without it being a Girls' Movie.
Please don't get me wrong - a lot of my favourite animated films have been female-led (and I'm very excited for Forbidden Island!), but I feel like those tend to get sidelined as being "for girls" just because women are the main characters, even when the story isn't about being a woman.
I obviously don't have access to any sort of market data for this, but I get the impression that Hoppers really has hit that "universal appeal" sweet spot, despite being about a girl-grandmother relationship and having a pretty equal gender balance overall.
comments under any httyd movie content be like "HEY disney take notes, this is how you do a live action!!!" how about no one does any live action ever again
"but the original director made it" "but it's a frame by frame replica of the original" stop making a fool of yourself
☝️☝️☝️
This!!
The Forgotten Island trailer just came out and I'm actually really excited for it.. The premise already looked super solid (written & directed by the directors of Puss in Boots; a story inspired by Philippine mythology that follows two best friends who end up on an island and the only way to leave may involve forgetting their entire friendship), but now that the trailer is out I can also say it looks fantastic.
I'm trying to figure out why the Moana live action remake looks so much worse to me than the HTTYD live action remake, and I think there are a few main factors:
The new character designs, especially The Rock in his wig.
I'm used to HTTYD being reinterpreted - it's already very different from the original book series, and with the TV shows, theme parks, and live shows, I've already seen a number of different designs for the characters. In contrast, the only other Moana design I've seen was in Wreck-It Ralph 2.
The fact that the original animation was very expressive, which is physically impossible for real humans to imitate.
The Rock. in a WIG.
Moana's constant wide shots make me feel like I'm watching the original (because all I can see is ocean and boat) until they cut back to the human characters and I realise something is up.
The awful combination of cartoony animals (Pua, Heihei) and realistic animals (everything Maui becomes)
DID I MENTION THE ROCK IN HIS FUCKING WIG.
It's such a shame that Moana takes place mostly on the open ocean because I truly think they did a wonderful job with Motonui:
I'm trying to figure out why the Moana live action remake looks so much worse to me than the HTTYD live action remake, and I think there are a few main factors:
The new character designs, especially The Rock in his wig.
I'm used to HTTYD being reinterpreted - it's already very different from the original book series, and with the TV shows, theme parks, and live shows, I've already seen a number of different designs for the characters. In contrast, the only other Moana design I've seen was in Wreck-It Ralph 2.
The fact that the original animation was very expressive, which is physically impossible for real humans to imitate.
The Rock. in a WIG.
Moana's constant wide shots make me feel like I'm watching the original (because all I can see is ocean and boat) until they cut back to the human characters and I realise something is up.
The awful combination of cartoony animals (Pua, Heihei) and realistic animals (everything Maui becomes)
DID I MENTION THE ROCK IN HIS FUCKING WIG.
Character designs concept art from Sony Animation’s GOAT (2026).
Art by Chloe Veillard (badmiaou on Instagram) and Donminique Dawson (costume designer)
FOOD!
Quane directed Nimona and Spies in Disguise while Gilbert was the head of story for the first film and Puss in Boots the Last Wish (one of the best animated films in history)
Chris Sanders returns to write script so he still has hands in this project!
Been thinking about this article from 2023, and trying desperately to figure out which DWA film was supposedly not fully animated in-house.
The first two are Dog Man (as said in the article) and The Bad Guys 2 (the "unannounced sequel"), but that still leaves one.
Unless they mean the HTTYD remake or the Gabby's Dollhouse movie (which are the only other co-productions Wikipedia lists for 2025) I have absolutely no idea what it's referring to.
On Shrek 5's animation style
I know it's been almost a year since the Shrek 5 teaser came out, but I still wanted to give my two cents. In short: I think Shrek 5 should've come out in 2016. Let me explain.
There are two main factors at play: 1. The redesign is sort of unexpected (and generic). 2. It's been over 15 years since the last Shrek.
So... What happened to Shrek 5?
I'll come back to #1 later, but for now I want to focus on #2. I think a lot of people don't realise how far animation technology has evolved since Shrek Forever After, which came out in 2010.
In 2010, DreamWorks was still animating in software called Emo, which was originally made in the 80s and was essentially a very big spreadsheet with a simple scene viewer. It looked like this:
While animators could click and drag body parts, they often ended up having to manually input numbers and stare at node names - and when they wanted to see what it actually looked like, they had to wait (seconds, sometimes minutes) for it to process the changes, at which point they could view the animation for one character at a time on a very simple model. (On HTTYD, they had to animate the dragons and riders separately because the software lagged too much when showing more than one character model.)
So in 2012, after four years of development, they finally got something better: Premo. Premo allowed animators to directly manipulate the models and see their results in real time. Oh, and they could view multiple models at once! In an environment!
How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) was the first time they used Premo, and it has been used for every DreamWorks film ever since, with updates whenever new features are needed. (Premo was integrated into DWA's new software platform called Apollo, which also included a new lighting tool called Torch, so it wasn't just the animation that changed. It's important to remember that the animation itself is just one part of the filmmaking process, and that the other tools that DWA uses (for modelling, effects simulation, rendering, etc.) are also ever-changing.)
Here are a couple of gifs for comparison. Look at the amount of nuance and detail they managed to get into his performance! (I've had it pointed out to me that ensuring parts of the fingers don't clip through themselves when bending would likely have been very tricky to do in Emo.)
Not just the animation is more refined (congratulations, Hiccup, on getting some fine motor skills!), but the second render is much more detailed, too, with a focusing camera, layered clothing made of different materials that would've been a nightmare to simulate/render for DWA just a few years earlier and a much more realistic look to the skin (already better than their first foray into more detailed skin rendering, Rise of the Guardians (2012)).
This jump in quality and change in character model is obviously huge, but it was incredibly well-received. In real life, 4 years had passed (in canon, 5) so to audiences it was totally understandable that Hiccup had aged (and gotten a Generic Heartthrob Teenager redesign). Additionally, the other characters (human and dragons) remained largely the same, and exploring the dragon-loving version of Berk felt like a natural reason for a sequel.
Then came How to Train Your Dragon 3 (2019), which used broadly the same character designs as HTTYD2, but continued the realism trend with even more detailed animation and rendering. This was the first feature film to use the Moonray renderer (which, by the way, is Open Source!), and you can tell it's a huge step up in terms of lighting and texture.
The overall style feels like quite a natural step after HTTYD2, but it's totally different to HTTYD1 with its comparatively flat renders and exaggerated movements:
This is, in my opinion, also the first time that DWA has really started leaning into what I call 'squishy animation' (because of the sheer amount of squash & stretch in it), which is a pretty big trend in animation nowadays. In my personal opinion, it can look great with more cartoony characters, but kind of uncanny with more realistic ones (especially when they're generally animated realistically). (Pay close attention to Hiccup's neck and that follow-through on Toothless' body!)
Here's another example of a 'realistic' squishy animation from Disney's Strange World (2022) compared to a shot from The Bad Guys (2022), which has character models that are heavily inspired by 2D animation:
(Important caveat: I don't want to throw Strange World (2022) under the bus, because I've heard amazing things about it, but the reason I haven't seen it yet is that the movement feels very uncanny to me when combined with the relatively realistic character designs/lighting/skin.)
Additionally, if you've been paying close attention to these examples, you may notice that a lot of modern character models look sort of 'airbrushed'. Compare HTTYD1 Hiccup to HTTYD3 Hiccup:
Now, I'm sure that, to some extent, the detailing on the older models was to make up for lack of render quality. If you can't make realistic skin, you can add some freckles to at least make it look less plasticky. Even so, Hiccup used to be absolutely covered in freckles - from his face to his hands - and by HTTYD3 they're much fainter and only visible in certain lighting. (Side note: I'm not going to address Toothless' redesign here - this is already a long post - but I do think it's important to mention that he also lost a lot of detail and ended up with much softer features. There's also this article about Toothless' animation style in HTTYD2 which goes into how careful the animators had to be to ensure he wasn't off-model... which was exactly what they ended up doing intentionally in HTTYD3.)
So, with that said, I want to try to understand what happened with Shrek 5.
Shrek 5's redesigns
As far as I can tell, DWA had three options: 1. Create a unique look for Shrek 5. 2. Try to emulate their old look, necessarily making their characters look dated. 3. Follow the trend, redesigning their characters and renders to fit modern sensibilities.
Option #1 could have been fun, but the question then becomes: which style? As much as I loved the look of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), I feel like its character designs only work because the focus is on their non-human characters. Its human character designs are a bit Disneyesque in their proportions and simplicity, which doesn't fit Shrek's caricature/realism style at all. Compare:
Adding new humans in that style would clash, and I think realistic humans in a bright, 'painterly' style wouldn't look great, either. The animation style also lends itself really well to its frequent action/fight sequences... something that Shrek has never really had. Another option would have been to create a third unique style for the Shrek franchise, but that could be quite risky - they'd be making it less cohesive, and they would risk locking themselves into a look that could age badly (personally, I bet that the 'painterly' style is going to end up being seen as very 'typical' for the 2020s!) or that they might not like anymore if they were to make more Shrek media later - more on that to come.
So, onto option #2, then: keep everything the same. That could work, but... at this point I'd like to invite you to imagine how uncanny the princesses would be when rendered in the same way as HTTYD3. The other Shrek films get away with it because, despite their human proportions, they still don't look real. This is an issue that videogames have had for years - the uncanny valley is very, very easy to fall into. I suspect that this is another part of the reason why Puss in Boots 2 chose to go for a whole new style for their human characters. (The Barbie franchise also went with a more generic big-eyes style as their renders got better.)
Besides, Shrek has actually changed quite a lot over time. Here's a comparison between Shrek (2001) and Shrek Forever After (2010) - the animation and render quality have massively improved, and I'm sure this is a different model:
While that second gif holds up pretty well, it'd look dated now, especially in a cinema (again, look at the HTTYD-HTTYD3 difference, and that was over 6 years ago). And besides, Shrek has always been known to push the envelope on animation technology, which brings us to option #3... actually follow the trend.
At that point, Shrek 5 undergoing the same fate as HTTYD3 feels entirely inevitable. Realistic skin, squishy animation, rounder character models...
...and, who can forget, a massive time skip that redesigns the characters now that it's been at least a decade since the last installment and they've got older kids? (Because, yes, there's a flash forward at the end of HTTYD3 that reveals the trilogy's events took place when Hiccup was still young, and that he has a kids now! And a beard!)
All of this - the aged-up characters, the slightly rounder designs, the toned-down textures, the squishy animation, the realistic renders - all combine to make something that is, at best, unfamiliar, and at worst, extremely uncanny.
Adding so much detail to the hair and environments, while removing detail from faces results in characters that look almost jelly-like. It reminds me a bit of the current 'dewy skin' make-up trend, which feels... entirely inappropriate for Shrek. It's hard for me to imagine those characters in Shrek's naturalistic, dirty world.
Additionally, it feels like a bit of a betrayal of the original Shrek, which was very much a dig at Disney. Its human/ogre characters have never been rounded and cutesy - they're either caricatured (like Fiona's parents, Farquaad, Rumpelstiltskin, etc.) or very realistic (like the princesses). (Though it should be noted that the Shrek franchise has become less subversive over time.)
So... what should they have done?
I'm not an animator or film tester, so I can't say for sure, but my Hot Take is that they should've made Shrek 5 back in 2016, when it was still a popular meme and they physically simply didn't have the technology to make him look like that.
Maybe we would even have had a Shrek 6 by now, and, like HTTYD2, Shrek 5 would've nicely bridged the gap and we wouldn't be complaining at all.
As the animator/youtuber Sir Wade Neistat put it: this may not just be a sequel, but a reboot - it's likely that they want to do more with Shrek after this, and they'll be looking to appeal to a new generation of kids, not just the old (nostalgic) fans. If this style is what modern kids want, they don't have much of a choice. While we don't know if they'll plan to do more with Shrek as a character, we do know that they're planning to release a Donkey spinoff in 2028, which will undoubtedly also influence Shrek 5's story and style. (I cannot recommend Sir Wade's video enough. He talks about style, the current state of the industry and other practical aspects. It's well worth it if you have 20 minutes to spare.)
As for what they'll actually do... I don't how they're going to respond, but they have plenty of time to figure it out. Animated films take years to develop as scripts/animatics, and then up to 2 years to fully animate. The first animated teaser came out in February 2025 with a release date of December 2026*, so it's very likely that the teaser was one of the first (or even only) things that had been fully animated at that point.
*Its current release date is June 2027 (instead of July 2026), because it was delayed twice. Contrary to popular belief, the first delay, in early 2025, was not in response to the teaser's reception - they actually announced the delay in January, a month before the teaser came out, giving Shrek 5's release slot to Minions 3 instead.** In August 2026, when everyone had stopped talking about it, they quietly delayed it for another 6 months again. Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) was only delayed 3 months for its redesign - though, of course, that was just one character. **DreamWorks Animation and Illumination are entirely separate studios, but they are currently both owned by Universal. When DWA was also acquired, it was decided that, between them, they would be allowed to release up to 4 films each year, hence being able to swap their release dates.
Animated films (well, really all films these days) go through a LOT of audience screenings from the time when production starts all the way up to release. They will be getting a lot of feedback; it's just a case of how they handle it.
I'm personally not going to speculate on the storyline, especially now that it's clear that DWA is taking more time to rethink it (for better or worse, Elio (2025) has already proven that you can entirely reinvent a film's story in a year), but I will say that sequels to franchises that already seemed to have a clear ending are hard to do. Shrek may have originally been planned to be a 5-film franchise, but I'd be very surprised if any of that original 5-story concept makes it in, given that it was supposed to be about Shrek's backstory. It'd be very funny if the whole film turned out to just be a story Shrek tells his children about his childhood, though...
In short - I think DWA missed their window to release a successful Shrek sequel by about 10 years, but I'm very interested to see what the next trailer will look like. Who knows - it might even be good.
One of my favourite things about the first RotG trailer (which only focuses on the Guardians) is all the shots where they rendered special versions without Jack or just straight up replaced him with Toothiana.
Presumably they didn't want to make it seem like Jack was one of them (or maybe they just didn't want to reveal who he was just yet!), but the idea of them having to spend days reworking the shots just for the trailer is really funny to me.
Maps of Burgess from Rise of the Guardians
via Peter Maynez (first image) and the ROTG: Creating an Epic documentary (second and third images), which was included on the 'Holiday' edition of the DVD/Blu-ray.
truly astonishing how, for the past 10 years, all it takes is some cold weather for me to start thinking about jack frost again.
some other things that make me think about jack frost, regardless of the time of year:
being high up (in a building, going over a bridge, in a plane, etc.)
wind (especially when it blows leaves around in swirls or blows through my hair)
seeing the (full) moon
being outside and seeing lights switched on in houses/buses/etc.
night (just, like, in general, but especially a clear night)
