CATDOLL: Animal Superheroes are useless, Disney beats DreamWorks with Baymax

"The past eight months have been the most difficult for DreamWorks Animation in its 20 years," DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg recently told the media. The box office failures of "Penguins of Madagascar" and "The Fabled Dog" last year have made things worse for the company. DreamWorks Animation has lost about $150 million. Some critics believe that DreamWorks' animations are obsessed with "animal superheroes" and have lost a lot of audiences.

Compared to the tough "Animal Superman", "Baymax" in "Big Hero 6" is soft and more in line with the emotional identification of most audiences, making it a popular anime character recently.

As "Big Hero 6" is now in theaters, Disney Animation is likely to return to its heyday. As the two largest animation companies in Hollywood, it is difficult not to compare the popularity of Disney with the bleakness of DreamWorks. Some commentators pointed out that the biggest difference between the two companies is that Disney mainly relies on derivatives for profit, while DreamWorks still makes most of its revenue from box office. In today's animation industry, establishing a complete product chain and making better use of character licensing to obtain subsequent benefits is undoubtedly a more mature and lasting profit model. But what makes DreamWorks headache is that the sales of derivatives are heavily dependent on the popularity of the animated characters. In the final analysis, the first thing is that the film must be popular enough. For example, the sluggish performance of "Speed" directly affected the sales of derivatives. The crux of DreamWorks still lies in the attractiveness of the film itself.

Disney also encountered an unprecedented predicament two years ago, and it was Frozen, released at the end of 2013, that pulled the entire team back from the bottom. Jennifer Lee, co-director of the film, believes that the success of Frozen lies in its character creation that breaks the traditional "princess movie" formula, and the imperfect character design allows many people to find emotional identification. Similarly, the role of "Baymax" in the new film "Big Hero 6" is popular because it fits the emotional identification of most audiences. In contrast, DreamWorks' animated characters, whether "Penguin" or "Snail", seem to be unable to get rid of the rut of "animal superman", or in other words, "not paying attention". At present, DreamWorks has greatly reduced the number of new film releases, and only one animated film "Home" is planned to be released this year.