The site is equal parts university campus and Adobe architecture-influenced community, with a grand fountain in its centre (with an enormous Shrek statue standing watch nearby), gardens and lush, green parks and floors and floors of animators, working by hand and with technology, on the studio's production slate.Īustralian audiences will meet the characters who populate those stories on two fronts this month, in the National Museum of Australia's DreamWorks Animation: The Exhibition, which features static and interactive artefacts from films such as Shrek, Trolls and How to Train Your Dragon, and with the release of the studio's newest film, Abominable, the story of an orphaned Yeti named Everest who, with three human friends, Yi, Jin and Peng, undertakes a dangerous expedition home.Īnimator Jill Culton is the first woman to 'helm' an animated feature from a major US studio.

Torresan is sitting in a corner workroom deep within the animation building on the labyrinthine studio lot. They completely changed the way I would see movies.' 'Then I saw Bambi, then Chuck Jones and Tex Avery and then European films. I started to interfere with those stories, and tried to change them,' Torresan says. 'From that point on I started reading comic books and picture books.

'I was traumatised, completely traumatised, but the storytelling and the drama, the caricature of that movie really played a big part in ,' Torresan says. Pierre-Olivier Vincent's artwork from How to Train Your Dragon (2010).

Dreamworks animation productions