The 10 Best DreamWorks Animated Movies of All Time

7. The Wild Robot

Year: 2024
Directors: Chris Sanders
Stars: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Catherine O’Hara
Rating: PG
Runtime: 102 minutes

Here is a DreamWorks animated feature that doesn’t feature much upfront dialogue at all, surely a terrifying prospect for a studio whose creative signature has long been pure yammering. At times, The Wild Robot feels almost elegiac – or is that just what happens when DreamWorks drops their worst habits and dedicates themselves to serving as a genuine creative competitor to their old rivals at Disney. The Wild Robot adapts Peter Brown’s book with DreamWorks’ later-period visual style, favoring more brush-like, illustration-friendly textures. The book is a middle-grade novel, but the movie actually looks more like a picture book, setting the harder, shinier surfaces of ROZZUM-7134 (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot who washes ashore on a remote island, against the warmer, bushier, more painterly surroundings. When Roz accidentally destroys a nest of goose eggs, she saves the final egg from the hungry fox Fink (Pedro Pascal, sounding a bit like Ben Schwartz) and winds up raising the runty hatchling, eventually named Brightbill (Kit Connor). Parent-child friction derives from Roz’s terrible secret, and Brightbill’s need to migrate with the other geese before winter comes to the island. Movies that attempt to convey the bittersweet experience of parenting to a younger audience are usually Pixar’s department, but Sanders has dabbled in this area with How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods. The Wild Robot is closer to those movies – in tenderness, in the energy and variety of its character designs, in fluidity of its animation, and in reference-light humor – than many other DreamWorks productions, and, for that matter, it’s better than some Pixar movies, too. Yet despite Sanders’ abiding interest in remaining an animator, rather than a calculating one-man board room, there is something – forgive me – programmatic about The Wild Robot, particularly in its attempts to tug at the heartstrings.—Jesse Hassenger

6. Antz

Year: 1998
Directors: Eric Darnell, Tim Johnson
Stars: Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Jennifer Lopez, Sylvester Stallone, Christopher Walken, Dan Aykroyd, Anne Bancroft, Danny Glover, Gene Hackman
Rating: PG
Runtime: 83 minutes

Before Dreamworks became a powerhouse with Shrek and Madagascar, the newly founded company recruited an all-star cast for Antz: Woody Allen, Dan Aykroyd, Anne Bancroft, Danny Glover, Gene Hackman, Christopher Walken and many more. Released in the same year as Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, Antz follows the inspiring story of a lowly worker ant Z (Woody Allen) who tries to work his way up the social ladder in the ant colony while falling in love with Queen Ant’s daughter, Princess Bala (Sharon Stone). —Eric Gossett

5. Shrek

Year: 2001
Director: Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson
Stars: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, John Lithgow
Rating: PG
Runtime: 90 minutes

There’s far more to Shrek than its status as a mean, green, meme machine. The parody-filled winner of the first-ever Best Animated Feature Oscar, Shrek’s pop cultural references and confident computer animation were a massive smash—establishing Dreamworks as a modern CG company to be taken seriously, even if its ogres were explicitly not to be. The quotable blend of superstars, fart jokes and company-defining smarm remains the cool kids’ alternative to fairy tales even if some of its humor (and Smash Mouth soundtrack) has aged like an onion’s many layers in the sun. It still showed a surprising amount of respect for its young audience and waggled many an eyebrow at the older crowd taking those kids to the theater. How many Disney baddies have names that sound like “fuckwad”? Cannes, historically, has never been wrong about movies with animated talking donkeys.—Jacob Oller

4. Rise of the Guardians

Year: 2012
Director: Peter Ramsey
Stars: Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, Isla Fisher, Hugh Jackman, Jude Law
Rating: PG
Runtime: 99 minutes

Based on the Guardians of Childhood book series by William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians has one of those premises so simple and brilliant as to induce a why-didn’t-I-think-of-that smack to the head. The idea is that famous figures from children’s lore all exist and work together to protect kids from harm. These appointed “guardians” are Santa Claus (Alec Baldwin), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) and the Sandman, who is mute. Leading them all is “Manny,” the Man in the Moon, who appears to them as, well, the moon. When Pitch, the Bogeyman (Jude Law) invades Santa’s castle and reveals his plans to spread fear around the world, Manny decides to recruit a new team member, and summons Jack Frost (Chris Pine) for the job. Frost is portrayed as an amiable teen slacker (complete with hoodie), who’s spent the 300-odd years of his existence just tooling around the world having fun and causing icy mischief. His problem is that since not enough children of the world believe in him, they also can’t see him, unlike the rest of the guardians, so he’s led something of a lonely and purposeless existence. The unconventional design of the guardians makes for a lot of the film’s charm. In a nod to Saint Nick’s European origins, Santa is patterned after a scimitar-wielding Russian Cossack, complete with accent. The Tooth Fairy is a luminous, multicolored hummingbird hybrid. The Easter Bunny is a pugnacious scrapper from the Outback. Sandman is impish and childlike, but brimming with power in the guise of the magical golden sand he uses to communicate as well as to create happy dreams. Pitch is the simplest of the figures, dressed in basic black, with a hawk nose and yellow eyes that convey menace without being too scary for the intended audience. As the bogeyman invades and sabotages the various guardians’ realms we also get to see how their operations run: Who’s really in charge of making Santa’s toys (it’s not who you think), how your teeth get out from under your pillow, etc. There’s a lot of creativity on display, and like most modern animation, it truly looks like a storybook come to life, full of warmth, deep colors and sparkles. —Dan Kaufman

3. The Prince of Egypt

Year: 1998
Director: Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells
Stars: Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, Steve Martin, Martin Short
Rating: PG
Runtime: 99 minutes

Dark, beautiful, and filled with songs as epic as its visuals, The Prince of Egypt came about when Jeffrey Katzenberg’s desire to make an animated version of The Ten Commandments finally became feasible after Katzenberg co-founded Dreamworks. The striking result is a painterly smorgasbord of Biblical imagery writ large that just happens to be voiced by a ton of A-listers and unexpected choices (Steven Martin and Martin Short? Why not!). It’s a lush and dramatic film with ambitions so high that it makes total sense when learning that its animators were sent to work on Shrek as a punishment if they weren’t up to snuff on Prince. It swings for the fences and mostly pulls it off, even if its grand vision wasn’t matched by equally grand successes.—Jacob Oller

2. Kung Fu Panda

Year: 2008
Director: John Stevenson
Stars: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Randall Duk Kim, James Hong, Dan Fogler, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jackie Chan
Rating: PG
Runtime: 91 minutes

Kung Fu Panda isn’t just a good movie—it’s a good kung fu movie. The title isn’t pandering, because the film truly respects its source material. Jack Black’s character may as well be Sammo Hung or Jackie Chan in one of his early roles. All of the classical elements are there—an obnoxious pupil who becomes a fighting machine. A team of (literally) animal-based martial artists with varying styles. An unbeatable, rampaging villain in the vein of the Ghost-Faced Killer from Mystery of Chessboxing. And a secret technique that the hero needs to learn in order to conquer that villain. It’s a funny, vibrant film as easily enjoyed by children as adults, and one that the adult viewers should feel no embarrassment for enjoying as much as they do. If you like classical martial arts filmmaking, Kung Fu Panda is probably the most faithful animated twist on the genre that anyone has pulled off so far. Too bad the same can’t be said of its overblown sequels. —J.V.

1. Chicken Run

Year: 2000
Directors: Peter Lord, Nick Park
Stars: Julia Sawalha, Lynn Ferguson, Mel Gibson, Miranda Richardson
Rating: G
Runtime: 84 minutes

Wallace and Gromit are perhaps Aardman’s sweetest stop-motion creations, but the clay poultry of Chicken Run might be their best. Riffing on prison bust movies like The Great Escape with kid-friendly flavor and slapstick that’s both hilarious and genuinely exciting, the farm-fleeing animated film is formally impressive and warmly winning to boot. It’s the best of the Disney ethos—talking animals helping along classic plot material, bolstered by a downright dreadful villain—with the added comic edge, elegant silent movie-like setpieces and brainy references of its sharp British creators. The plucky action/comedy even features one of the better Mel Gibson performances, with the added benefit of not having to look at him while enjoying it.—Jacob Oller