Dreamworks CGI Features are Simply Funnier Than Pixar CGI Features

Pixar's movies may not be flat-out gagfests from beginning to end, but that's because their stories are so much an outgrowth of the characters in them. They build real personalities and emotions for their characters, and that makes every film they do that much more enjoyable. With DreamWorks, I don't get that sense. It feels like they're trying to do what Pixar does without really knowing how.

Even in that respect, though, I still think Pixar is funnier. For instance, there are so many scenes in movies like Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story that make me laugh out loud, even after I've seen the film more than ten times. The last DreamWorks movie I watched, Madagascar, didn't make me laugh once.
 
I think the thing about reference humor is that it can be funny if it's used to enhance an existing joke. If the reference itself is the joke, however, then eventually no one's going to get it.

One example of the latter that sticks in my head is one from Madagascar. In one scene, when the lemurs are all panicking about the fossa, one of them jumps up and shouts "IT'S A COOKBOOK!". I mean, as far as Twilight Zone references go, it's not even particularly clever in context, since they already know the fossa will eat them.

A good one, to me, is one like the President's keyboard playing at the start of Monsters vs. Aliens. It's two references in one, in fact: the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the theme song to a TV series that I can't recall right now. Even without seeing Third Kind, it's not too hard to wrap one's head around playing music to communicate with aliens, and the way the president plays the keyboard is still a joke all in of itself. It's funnier if you get the reference, sure, but there's still a joke there even without it.
 
To be fair, that's not a fleeting, forgotten in a moment reference. That reference is 60 years old, by the date of the original short story.

Referring to earlier posters, I don't get where this Dreamsworks films have no heart stuff comes from. The first Shrek touched me a lot more than the annoying glurge of Finding Nemo did. I emphasized greatly with Susan and her desire to be loved for who she is. And How to Train Your Dragon was a very moving coming of age story, you really care about Hiccup. I'll be the first to say that some Pixar films, namely Up and Wall-E, are more touching than anything Dreamworks has done, but it's not an across the board superiority in this aspect.
 
I'm a Pixar fanboy. But I gotta admit, I've never laughed out loud while watching a Pixar film. I have laughed out loud while watching a Dreamworks film. Like the thread started said, Pixar's humor is very gentle. And their movies are more about character and heart, than the humor IMO. It seems like they use gentle humor to keep the film from feeling heavy. But the one time it didn't work IMO was during Toy Story 3. I love that movie, but as soon as they talked about all the toys who were no longer with them during that meeting at the beginning of the film, it was so sad to me from that moment until the end. Especially remembering what Andy's roon use to be like. And I had this melancholy feeling that wouldn't felt up for the rest of the film.
 
I think in the average Dreamworks fare, there's heart there. The problem, is it get buried under bad/dated jokes. This is where Shrek, Kung Fu Panda and How To Train Your Dragon excel. The jokes don't stop the story, the humor is good and you care for the characters.

My issue with say, Monsters Vs. Aliens is that the idea that Susan wanting to be loved for who she is no matter what, wasn't pushed far enough. It felt like it couldn't decide from making her more bold or making her want to be herself. We never got a chance to see the "old" Susan. Just "confused" and then "new" Susan. Her ex-fiance Derrick was the bad guy, but we knew nothing about him. While he did a jerk move it wasn't set up in a way where I could actually care about either of them.
 
I think the movies have heart but even so sometimes the heart moments feel forced and drab. And not to mention holes you can drive a truck through.

For instance, How To Train Your Dragon's message of pacifism and joining togetherness sort of falls apart with the big bad and the third act. And that is why it is not best animated feature material to me.
 
Having just watched the film for the first time, I'll definitely grant you that. Chris Sanders and Dean Deblois did what I thought was impossible - they made a DreamWorks movie where I actually care about what happens to the characters.
 
If I had to pick the funniest CGI film of all time, it would be Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs which wasn't made by Pixar or Dreamworks, and it was still visually impressive considering it was one of (or the? not sure if you wanna count Horton Hears a Who!) the first CGI films to use overly cartoony animation that you still can't really find in any other CGI film.

I mean sure, Pixar and Dreamworks and scuh will use stretch and squash, but the way the Cloudy characters moved, the expressions they made, you don't see stuff like that very often in CGI works.

I will agree SOMEWHAT on the Looney Tunes vs. Disney debate, but more on a level of what I'm feeling. I might change Looney Tunes to MGM Tex Avery however.

If I want to watch a cartoon with technical impressiveness with a building story and characters that you grow to like and care for their problems, I'll probably go with Disney. If I want to watch wackiness and silly humor but still based around characters that I will also enjoy seeing on screen, I'll go watch Tex Avery.

I also don't know why people keep pulling out old films as slander against Dreamworks, like Shark Tale. That was so long ago and based on what Dreamworks has done now, I say they have come a long way from Shark Tale.

I would say really the only truly hit and miss thing Dreamworks has had lately would be Shrek 4, but by then, critical audiences were sick of Shrek so we all know this was mainly a ploy for money. Monsters vs. Aliens was decent enough to good by some eyes, Kung Fu Panda and How to Train your Dragon are well loved, and now we have Megamind which is supposedly hilarious according to some people here.

Pixar, I think, has gotten more humor gentle and story-based as time went by. Toy Story, Monsters Inc., A Bugs Life had a bit more zip to them. The Incredibles was pretty dark and only had a few laugh-out-loud moments, then there's things like WALL-E, Up! and even Toy Story 3 which have more serious, "i'm capturing your attention for the story" moments than laughter.

Not to say that Pixar's movies are boring, it's all so opinion based it's weird. By myself, I don't laugh very often at Pixar, but my attention is grabbed instantly by it. But when I watch it with a friend, who has a way of making things funny no matter what, he ends up opening up how funny everything is in Pixar, such as the loud sound that Kevin makes in Up! which he found was hilarious and started imitating it, which made me start laughing.

So yeah, I would agree with the OP on some level. I feel more like Dreamworks = casual while Pixar = serious.

And with Megamind out, which I cannot wait to see since I LOVED the trailers, it'll probably only boost my opinon on it more.

And just remember, Pixar has a ton of sequels coming out too, one of them is based on Cars which last time I checked, wasn't their most popular film. And it has a generic plot that ever big race story has. Pixar will probably have their fair share of crapper sequels like Dreamworks.
 
What? I didn't see a lesson in pacifism, if I wanted to go deeper than what was said it felt more of a "There's something good if we just look deeper." Hiccup wasn't a screw up, he was just suited to other things, the dragons weren't all evil they just had a job to do. Never pacifism though.
 
I thought "Cloudy..." was really cute, but didn't you think it felt a bit like Monsters vs Aliens in a way? I'm not saying the stories were similar, but a lot of gags and situations were similar.

That said, when I want an animated film laugh, I usually pop in the Beavis and Butthead movie...:D
 
Just saying as someone who didn't know that was a Twilight Zone reference until after he had seen the movie, I thought it was pretty funny mainly just in the way it was being screamed. Of course, I got the reference later.
 
Two random thoughts about the topic of this thread:

- I don't know that you can have this conversation about any other two creative studios in Hollywood, for any other adjective you'd care to mention. "Warner Bros. Features are Simply Funnier Than Paramount Features." This makes no sense. I think this says more about how straitjacketed DreamWorks and Pixar still are compared to the rest of Hollywood, even if the films (from Pixar, at least) tend to be better than the rest of Hollywood.

- I still think the basis for comparison is screwy in the thread premise. I can transpose the starting point of this thread to live-action and get "The Marx Bros. Features are Simply Funnier Than The Michael McKean/Harry Shearer/Catherine O'Hara/Eugene Levy Ensemble Comedies" (Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind, and I suppose you could grandfather This Is Spinal Tap in there as well), because the Marx Bros. were crazy and off-the-wall and had the same kind of manic energy that Looney Tunes did, while those other films tend to be more low-key, deadpan, or cerebral humor that doesn't rely on sheer wackiness. I think the statement you get is also wrong and the argument it's based on is non-sensical. I laugh as long and as hard at stuff in Best in Show as I do at stuff in a Marx Bros. routine, but I'm laughing for entirely different reasons.

Not all jokes are created equal. Monty Python wrung a bunch of humor out of that in their "Evolution of the Jape" sketch that's in Live at the Hollywood Bowl, eschewing most of their usual nutty antics in favor of Graham Chapman reciting the driest, most overblown pseudo-academia on slapstick joke techniques while the Pythons in the background were executing literally the oldest jokes in the book in meticulous, careful, and highly telegraphed routines. In theory, there is nothing about that situation that should be funny. The sketch SHOULD NOT WORK, but I think it's one of the funniest things I think the Pythons ever did.

Oh, I also thought of one LOL moment from a Pixar film, and that's the one in the first Toy Story when Buzz thinks he's suffocating because Woody opened his space helmet. Woody gets this reaction shot, maybe a second and a half, where he looks at Buzz and then looks away. I absolutely busted a gut laughing at that one.
 
I just have to disagree, Ed. I think when you get gentler humor you often get gentler laughs. A Mighty Wind is a fantastic film, where else are you going to find out about the virtues of the neuftet, but it draws chuckles from me, not belly laughs like Duck Soup. And I also don't think those films are as much polar opposite to Marx as you do, they're also filled with absurdity and clever dialogue and if you allow This Is Spinal Tap in then it upsets the whole applecart because it has its own cartoony energy, just look at the scene where they get stuck under the arena or the miniature Stonehenge.

I agree that that "suffocation" scene from Toy Story is great, though.
 
Just to clarify, I'm not saying that those films ARE the polar opposite of the Marx Bros. That's kind of the point of my objection: I think the position that begins this thread is making a polar opposite of two things that aren't polar opposites of each other. I don't know that this is a sensible comparison to make, especially when it comes to something as subjective as humor. Given that, I definitely can't wrap my brain around pinning the justification for that comparison on something as specific as you have.

Pulling in a different example, you can say something like "a Scotch bonnet pepper is spicier than a jalapeno" because you're measuring the same thing. Both varieties of pepper produce the same sensation, but the difference is in degree. There is even a publicly accepted gauge to measure that spiciness. "Jalapenos are spicier than Sichuan peppercorns" is NOT a valid comparison to make because they are entirely different kinds of spicy sensations. I can't say which is "spicier" because the burn of a jalapeno and the numbness of a Sichuan peppercorn are so totally different from each other that a comparison between the two on the same dimension is meaningless. "A jalapeno is spicier than a Sichuan peppercorn because it's a pod of the capiscum family" just appends a reasonably factual statement to a fundamentally problematic argument. The accuracy of the fact does not make the argument any less problematic.

I also can't say that I see the same kind of cartoony energy in those scenes of Spinal Tap as in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Cartoon-ISH, perhaps, but that's still not the same type of humor that I think you're talking about. The "lost backstage" scene is hilarious, but I just can't see that as tickling the same funny center in the brain as stuff like "Duck Amuck" or "What's Opera Doc?" or even a Coyote/Road Runner cartoon. There's an ideal of zany, cartoonish mayhem that is absolutely not in that lost backstage scene. Spinal Tap and the later movies tend to deadpan their humor, even when they're being patently ridiculous, while I don't know that I'd say the same thing about Looney Tunes.

Regardless, the subjectivity of humor also means that I can belly laugh at Best in Show as much as at the Marx Bros. You can't. So which of us can say with any objective accuracy that one is "funnier" than the other?
 
LOL yeah, that's a bit of a stretch there.

I still fail to see what makes Dreamworks animated features consistently funnier than a Pixar movie. Considering all the bad characters and mediocre movies that have come out. I still don't know why Jackie Chan was cast for several lines of rather unfunny dialogue as a monkey in Kung Fu Panda.

Also in Shrek 4, you had Jane Lynch and Jon Hamm two huge television stars. Jane Lynch is known for her comedy work and yet she had absolutely nothing to work with in Shrek 4. Jon Hamm's character barely did anything at all, but I will give them credit in that his ogre character was originally supposed to be a romantic rival to Shrek but all that material was cut in the production stages. It was pointless to cast Jane Lynch of all people in such a meager and unmemorable role. Same thing with Seth Rogen and John Krasinski in the third movie.

In the Madagascar movies you had a handful of big stars playing the lead characters who were fairly lame. The best, most popular, and funniest characters are the Penguins who ended up getting their own hit TV series rather than the actual main characters.
 
Not necessarily the best comparison, since WB and Paramount are huge entities that distribute dozens of a films a year made by various smaller production outlets (Dreamworks Animation being one of Paramount's). A smarter comparison would be something like "Bad Robot Features are Simply Cooler Than Dimension Features"; since both are smaller studios dedicated to action/genre films, a comparison could potentially be made.
 
I think the whole question is getting too complicated and bogged down in comparative analogies that don't -exactly- fit. Here is my thesis. Dreamworks features have a different, more energetic and anarchic style of humor that is on the whole funnier than Pixar's gentle character-based humor. I would also add that they have a greater overall focus on humor and that their jokes are generally more biting and irreverent. These all add up to more humor per feature on the Dreamworks side. I don't see myself setting up polar opposites in that, just stating a style preference.

I understand the question you're raising. Does one define funny as a matter of type or degree? But I think the answer is both. Knock knock jokes or children's riddles are a type of humor that just isn't as funny as, say, the dirty joke. There's room for ranges of degree and overlap within types, of course, you can make a funny-ass knock knock joke and even a dirty knock knock joke, but generally they provide less laughs than dirty jokes because they are less stimulating.



Unless we did some kind of scientific "laughs per minute" study, objective is out the window. Everything I'm saying is a personal assessment and an opening for others to agree or disagree and provide their reasoning.
 
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