Head of DWA TV Animation SPEAKS

Margie Cohn, head of DreamWorks television animation division, talks about the division winning a cartload of Emmy nomination:

... We’re really proud of our work and we set our creative bar high. It’s extremely nice to be recognized for that, and because we’re such a new player the number of nominations feels especially gratifying. We have a studio full of incredibly talented artists and writers and production people, and they’re being recognized for individual achievement as well as the shows themselves are being recognized as outstanding. It’s exciting!” ...

People are not competing for the best time slots, they’re very collegial, which is a fantastic thing in the studio. Also, the nonlinear platform has encouraged us to innovate in how we tell stories. If you think about it there are no commercials. There’s the ability to binge watch. So it gives us an opportunity for deeper more complex stories, and even some serialization in our comedies. There are some shows we are designing to be serialized, adventure shows like Voltron, Dragons has some serialization, but even in shows like All Hail King Julien we’ll often have mini-arcs. ...

The thing that's useful to remember here is that DWA tv went from a standing start with NO small-screen production under it's belt to hundreds and hundreds of half-hours in and (recently) out of the production pipeline. No other animation company, not even Disney TVA when it was ramping up beaucoup syndicated productions in the 1990s, had that steep a trajectory.

Netflix has extended and deepened DreamWorks Animation's original deal, and the new media distribution company is adding a lot of much-needed moolah to DreamWorks Animation's bottom line. You want to know why Los Angeles television animation production is bursting at the seams, look no further Netflix and its online cousins, which are pumping hundreds of millions into cartoons, the better to lure the small fry into binge watching the antics of fuzzy animals and affiliated characters.