Peter Gal on the DreamWorks Animation Model

Peter Gal, chief creative officer for television at DreamWorks Animation, discussed the studio’s approach to mining its treasure trove of IP for new series and specials for kids and families at the TV Kids Festival today.

In conversation with TV Kids’ group editorial director, Anna Carugati, Gal showcased the studio’s expanding slate, with some 20 shows in various stages of production. You can watch the entire session here. “We’re lucky to have a lot of IP to draw from,” Gal said. “Each piece of IP requires its own strategy and examination.”

The Croods: Family Tree, for example, picks up after the events of The Croods: A New Age. “We felt like these new characters introduced in the second film and the comedic conflict between this new family, the Bettermans, and our original family, the Croods—there was so much comedy to derive from that. So that became a comedy set in the world of that second film. It was a new environment that just needed more exploration.”

The approach was different for the Dragons franchise, Gal said, which already had three feature films and several How to Train Your Dragon series, all set in the Viking world. “We felt like it was time in television to do something new, to eventize this new series. So we brought the action forward 1,500 years, out of Viking times and into the modern day” for Dragons: The Nine Realms.

In developing new series based on existing IP, there’s always a balancing act “to consider the wants, needs and desires of the fan base—and a lot of our shows have incredibly passionate fans—but you also do need to reinvigorate sometimes and bring new ideas into a property.”

On what animation style best suits a property, Gal noted, “Most of what we’ve done has been in CG, but on certain franchises, we decided to pivot for the TV series and do them in 2D. Those decisions are driven by a lot of different factors. But we usually let the creative speak to it. When you’re talking about a big-budget DreamWorks feature, sometimes everything you can achieve in CGI for that feature might be too challenging to do on a TV budget. Sometimes you’d consider a change for production. But we don’t want to take this big, expansive world of a film and make it feel small by limiting locations. We generally follow the passion of our showrunners, film directors and creative teams.”

Gal went on to discuss the new creative opportunities being ushered in by the streamers. Over much of his career in TV animation, working for linear networks, Gal said serialized storytelling was “incredibly challenging. The environment was unfriendly to it because [the linear networks] wanted to be able to replay the episodes over and over again out of order. Now, in streaming, you can embrace serialization in a totally different way.”

He also pointed to the volume of animation being supported by the streamers. “I’m excited to see people taking some risks and trying some things that are different.”

Linear networks also had clear brand identities, Gal added. “When you tried to do something very different, even if it was great, sometimes it wouldn’t resonate as much. The streaming platforms are more open brands, so it allows them to take more risks, which is exciting for us as producers.”

Carugati asked Gal about finding the best home for a property. “We generally follow the passions of the different platforms. Every platform has its own strategy. But the strategy comes down to the individuals who are the decision-makers at those platforms. They all have different tastes. We work hard to maintain a broad development slate, a lot of different projects tonally. We have everything from the youngest preschool to bridge to older comedy serialized adventure that feels like it’s more for 6 to 8 and serialized adventure that goes older and leans more teen. We’ve sold two shows in the entry-level kids’ and family horror space, that’s new for us. That’s how we try to manage all the platforms: having a lot of different things always percolating up through the development pipeline.”

In crafting a development slate that has both existing IP and new ideas, Gal stated: “We try to have a healthy mix at all times. Sometimes it feels like the business is pivoting one way or the other. Sometimes, the market feels very driven by people only wanting known IP with a built-in marketing advantage. But a few months later, one of our buyers will surface and say, we’re craving something new, we want to break new IP. Every franchise started as an original. So we try to keep a healthy balance. We’re not going to overlook an opportunity to do something exciting based on DreamWorks or Universal IP. But coming up as an animation development executive at Disney and Nick, we built those brands on originals. That’s always going to be a healthy part of our development slate.”

On international collaborations, Gal noted, “We’re always looking for great partnerships globally. It’s more important than ever as a way to get top-quality work done. There’s more animation happening than ever. The market for talent in Los Angeles, as elsewhere, has gotten so competitive. We like to work with the best artists, wherever we can find them, and with the best studios. That has led to incredible co-production opportunities.”

Go, Dog. Go!, for example, is a collaboration with WildBrain, which had acquired the adaptation rights to the popular PD Eastman book. “When we find a piece of IP that a studio somewhere else in the world holds that we’d love to play with creatively on, we will pursue that opportunity.”

Gal continued, “We respond to studios with a strong pool of artists, a strong creative point of view and a shared vision. We want to pursue more of those opportunities.”

On interactive storytelling opportunities such as Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale for Netflix, Gal said, “We’ve learned they are so complicated and hard to produce! You take our creative showrunners, writers and directors and almost ask them to be mathematicians or physicists, figuring out how all of these different threads and pieces of a story can fit together. It’s incredibly technical. All of the ones we’ve done have been in partnership with Netflix. It was an initiative driven by them and wanting to break into this area of interactive storytelling. We have one more coming out next year. Whether we do more will largely be driven by whether our partners are requesting them. There are opportunities to do more, but it’s not something we would necessarily drive ourselves. It’s platform dependent.”

Gal then went on to discuss DreamWorks Animation’s various diversity initiatives. “We’ve been very thoughtful about it in an on-screen way for quite some time. You know animation takes years to get off the ground. We’ve been thinking for years about putting diverse characters front and center on-screen. We realize there’s so much more to do behind the scenes, on the talent side. We’ve worked hard over the past couple of years and ramped up our efforts considerably to make sure that the staff on each show have more diversity. Whenever there’s representation on-screen, we want to try to have some of that representation in the writers’ room, on the directing staff. We’ve always looked at DreamWorks as a place where people can start and grow careers. We’re trying to build the next generation of talent. Obviously, like every studio now, we are looking for established and experienced female and diverse leadership for shows. We’re attracting people to the studio. At the same, we’re trying to build the next generation of talent.”