PLEASE support Dreamworks Animation and watch Home in theaters.
"Why?" you ask. "The movie looks somewhat interesting, but not enough to buy a ticket for."
At the beginning of this year, Dreamworks Animation had to cut 500 jobs in their department - over 20% of their total employees - and cut their output from 3 to 2 movies per year, due to their continued misses in the box office. In fact, Home is the ONLY Dreamworks movie to be released this year.
Movies like Rise of the Guardians and Mr. Peabody and Sherman, while good movies, were unsuccessful in the box office. It is a popular question if Dreamworks can survive another failure.
The company is in debt, the stock value of Dreamworks has drastically decreased, and competitors such as Disney and Warner Bros are providing difficult competition.
Now, why should you support Dreamworks?
Dreamworks is one of the few animation studios to truly put themselves out there and create something new. Disney, whom everyone idolizes - and yes, I love too - plays it safe with princess movie after princess movie, love interest after love interest, skinny, big-eyed heroine after skinny, big-eyed heroine. Disney adapts pre-created stories, and everyone in their movies fits the Eurocentric definition of beauty.
Dreamworks breaks the mold.
Dreamworks makes movies about people who don’t fall in love. The stories are wacky, weird, but infinitely more original. While Disney opts for retellings of famous legends and stories, Dreamworks makes movies like Megamind, How to Train Your Dragon, Spirit, Kung Fu Panda, Shrek, and The Croods. Maybe these don’t sound “groundbreaking” just to hear the titles, but think about it - Dreamworks makes movies where the villain is the main character (Megamind), where the “nice guy” isn’t the “good guy” (Megamind), where characters challenge societal and cultural beliefs (How to Train Your Dragon), where characters who people write off as “inept” are able to overcome their odds without changing their individual identity (Kung Fu Panda), and so much more.
Dreamworks also creates a diverse and varied cast for every film because Dreamworks is not afraid to depict characters who do not fit modern Eurocentric definitions of beauty. Dreamworks depicts women with varying weights, body types, noses, hair, any sort of physical feature. Women are depicted as they are in real life - different. The men follow suit. The body positivity that Dreamworks promotes through its films is practically unseen in Disney Animation, where all women have the same nose and look like they wear a corset at all times.
(You want proof of Dreamworks’ body positivity? Here)
Also - and, admittedly, Disney beat them to it - a female black lead? In animation? CAN YOU NAME MORE THAN TWO ANIMATED FILMS WITH A FEMALE BLACK LEAD? This representation is INSANELY important, and if we do not show our support by watching the movie in-theaters, we could be risking the opportunity to see more diversity in the media!
If we lose Dreamworks Animation, we lose one of the most diverse animation studios in the game. We lose more than just “this year’s animal movie” or “that movie where the girl looks weird”. We lose SO MUCH diversity in story-telling, we lose body positivity, we lose unique stories within the media, and the field of animation itself will suffer terribly for the loss of one of the biggest franchises supporting it in this nation. We CANNOT lose Dreamworks.
PLEASE, go see Home. PLEASE, support Dreamworks. PLEASE, realize that Dreamworks - while wacky - is so very, very important to the field of animation, and we cannot afford to let it die.
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