DreamWorks Have Stepped Down Their Game

Rating: 7/10 (25 March 2013)

I've always liked DreamWorks Animation. They've made some classics like Shrek and Kung Fu Panda, and a couple of their movies can even be looked at being as great as Pixar (in my opinion, Kung Fu Panda 2 and How to Train Your Dragon are about as great as a lot of Pixar's movies).
They're normally the first CGI animation company to produce a movie each year, and this year is no exception. This is The Croods. When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought it didn't look like a DreamWorks film. It looked like something from Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon. In other words, not very appealing. But let's see how this was.
The Croods is about a prehistoric family who's routine is to stay in a cave to survive predators, occasionally going outside looking for food. The family's daughter, however, wants to explore the outside world. One day, a giant earthquake ruins the family's cave, and they have to go out looking for a new one in an undiscovered world, together with a lonesome adventurer called Guy. That's as far as I'll go into the story.
The Croods is actually much better than I expected. It isn't great, but it's at the peek of being really good. The major downsides are two things: The character models and the story. Let's first talk about the character models: They look like they were made for a cheap TV animated movie, but then later put into a DreamWorks film and given some better textures. The animation itself is as brilliant as DreamWorks movies usually are, but the character models just don't fit with the rest of the movie. At the very least, they don't fit in with DreamWorks' other movies.
The story isn't special, but it isn't bad either. But my problem is the ending. I won't spoil anything, but there's a point in the movie where I think they should've just ended it, but then they had to keep going because they needed to make it a fully happy ending. It completely ruined the symbol of the characters, and the dramatic elements present where fully botched.
On a good note, The Croods can be hilarious. It has a more CROOD humor (see what I did there), and I found it a nice change from your typical family animated movies. The characters are also entertaining, with a couple exceptions like Thunk and Sandy, who even though their a part of the family, serve no true point to the story.
Overall, The Croods is a very entertaining movie. There is some lost potential in the writing and the character models are ugly, but the rest of the movie is pretty top-notch. It's not up there with DreamWork's best works, but it's still pretty good. My only worry about this movie is that it doesn't seem like this is just filler for a greater DreamWorks movie to come later this year, like Madagascar 3 was last year. Because the next DreamWorks movie is called Turbo, and it looks like a bland rip-off of Cars with snails. And after that, we get Mr. Peabody & Sherman, who I don't see how they need a feature film. All in all, 2013 won't be a great year for DreamWorks, I'm pretty sure of that. But we'll see.