Film analysis of incentives in Pixar and Dreamworks

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In this blog post I will be discussing the incentives that Pixar provides that other children’s movie companies fail to. I will be looking at two opening scenes to different movies. One from Dreamworks and one from Pixar. I tried to pick a movie from each animation studio that had great success in the box office.

When viewing the opening scene in Pixar’s UP, the viewer is welcomed into the film with a happy wedding just finishing up. The guests are cheering loudly while soft, happy, almost french style music complemented the two main characters in this scene smiling. The audience is taken through the life of this happy couple everywhere from them fixing up their new house, to the wife straightening the man’s tie every morning before work. We are shown that they have been trying to save for a trip for some time now, but before we know it, the couple has aged quite a lot and the trip never happened. The opening scene concludes with the death of the man’s wife. The scene is filled with references to earlier parts of their lives such as a hill where they used to cloud watch, or balloons, making this scene very detailed and very emotional for the viewer to watch.

Pixar is able to pull at the viewers emotions and make them feel something much deeper. Pixar uses this ability to try to affect the viewers in some emotional way. I think this is a very strong incentive for viewers to go to their movies, year after year.

Dreamwork’s Shrek was a completely different opening scene. The viewer is given the backstory though a typical fairy tale storybook with a narrator reading it to the audience. At the end of the short fable, the narrator rips the last page out and presumably uses it for toilet paper in his bathroom. A loud rock song is played as we are taken through the ogres disgusting habits and his home. The opening credits are creatively placed in the ogres spit, or bugs in this scene. After we see how the main character lives his life, we are already introduced to the conflict. There is a mob out and they are hunting Shrek, because there has been an order to hunt all fairy tale creatures. The interaction between the mob and the ogre is quote entertaining for the viewers with its clever depiction of fairy tales and Mike Myers’s voice acting for Shrek.

https://www.shreksadventure.com

As you can see, Dreamworks is known for it’s ability to appeal to audiences with humor. Dreamworks has used voices of established comedians such as Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, and Mike Meyers. In Shrek we see the high level of creativity in the writers for creating a story with preexisting fairy tales and making them exist in one universe. I cannot deny that Dreamworks movies make me laugh much more than Pixar movies, however I find myself gravitating towards Pixar much more often. I think this is a strong incentive for some viewers but can actually discourage some from coming to their films.

I think Pixar is able to appeal to more audiences because it provides a much more reliable, emotional, and rewarding set of incentives that is associated with every film they produce.