It must be strange being the new kid on a block that you spent a decade helping to build into a skyscraper, but the man they call the animation tsar looks happy to be back at the drawing board aiming for the skies again.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, the 'K' in new studio DreamWorks SKG (S is for Steven Spielberg and G for David Geffen) has good reason to be smiling. The past four years have been spent laying the foundations for what he hopes will be his new animation empire at DreamWorks.
This year has finally brought the visual fruits of his labour with the release of computer generated animation, Antz, which has already scooped up more than US$74 million (about HK$573 million) at the box office so. There is also the Christmas release for the studio's new hand-drawn animation, Prince Of Egypt, to look forward to. Little wonder Katzenberg has seen fit to jet around Asia to personally explain his dream for a new kind of animation.
'It's been quite an adventure and gone really fast,' Katzenberg said during a brief stopover in Hong Kong. 'There has been a lot of work and a lot of exciting challenges along the way but I've loved it. Absolutely loved it.' Katzenberg is singing a different 'toon to his days as chairman of The Walt Disney Studios where he oversaw some of the studio's most successful animated features, such as Aladdin and The Lion King. He left Disney in 1994 after a falling-out with chairman Michael Eisner after he was overlooked for a promotion. He and partners, Spielberg and Geffen, pooled together more than US$2 billion to start DreamWorks, the first studio to be set up in Hollywood in more than 50 years.
Katzenberg also sued Disney for a share of the profits from the animated features produced during his time there and reportedly received a settlement from the studio which insiders estimate at more than US$100 million. That plus the fact that both DreamWorks' Antz and Disney's A Bug's Life are both computer-generated animations with a similar storyline, suggests that perhaps Katzenberg is putting himself in direct competition with his ex-employers.
The 45-year-old native New Yorker dismisses the fact that both studios are releasing an insect movie as 'coincidence'. 'That has happened in Hollywood before but people have made more out of it than there is,' he said. 'I hear A Bug's Life is great. I'm sure they will do very well with it [but] they're both very different movies.' Disney's animated features, and indeed most Hollywood animation, traditionally were aimed at the younger age group of viewers. With DreamWorks, Katzenberg is trying to rewrite the rules and provide the entertainment for a more mature audience.
