Photo Gallery Surprised by Shrek
Jeffrey Katzenberg has had a phenomenally successful career bringing animated films to the big screen. While chairman of Walt Disney Studios from 1984 to 1994, he was responsible for hits such as The Little Mermaid and The Lion King.
In 1994, he teamed up with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen to launch DreamWorks SKG, whose animation unit he heads. The company has revolutionized animated films with some of the biggest-grossing hits of all time, including Shrek and Kung Fu Panda.
Half of the top-ten animated movies in terms of box-office receipts have been made under Katzenberg's leadership. In a SPIEGEL interview, he discussed why these movies are becoming more and more expensive:
"The movies we've been making are among the most complex films being made anywhere and by anyone in the world today," Katzenberg said. "Animated films take four to five years to make and involve between 400 and 500 artists. On average, our movies have 130,000 frames a piece. Each frame has to go through 12 different stages of production in the course of making the movie, And, in each stage, each frame goes through anywhere from 10 to 100 revisions. If you do the math, that's about half a billion frames for making each one of our movies." Here, a frame from the 2013 DreamWorks film The Croods.
When asked about the market for animated films in Germany, Katzenberg said: "Our movies have been wildly popular in Germany. I would say that one of the things that is clearly distinctive and stands out in Germany is that there is a great preference for movies that are fables. And fables are films that have animals as the main characters. So they much prefer animated films with animals as the main characters as oppose to humans." Here, a frame from the 2012 DreamWorks hit Madagascar 3.
When asked which animated film came as the biggest surprise, Katzenberg said: "I would say Shrek. When we made Shrek, we were doing something that was so different from anything that anybody had ever tried before. It basically took the whole concept of a fairy tale and turned it upside down and inside out. It was very risky enterprise for us, but it obviously paid off."
