Dreamworks Animation- we have all come to know it as one of the competitors to Pixar and in recent years Disney. Its smash-hit franchises including Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, and now The Croods have entertained audiences all around the world. It's currently a publicly traded company, but it wasn't always that way. Read on and you'll find how DreamWorks became a phenomenon in animation a really fascinating story.

It all began in the Fall of 1994 when a trio of entertainment players, which consisted of legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who at the time recently quit his position as an executive for Walt Disney Studios, and film producer and music executive David Geffen, formed a new major Hollywood studio, DreamWorks SKG (the SKG is short for Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen). On the heels of the blockbuster success of Disney's The Lion King that summer, an animation division was formed under the new studio. The new studio attracted many artists and employees from Amblimation, the former animation branch of Spielberg's production company Amblin Entertainment, as some of them first joined in 1995 following the completion of their last feature, Balto. When the studio closed down in 1997, the rest of the staff relocated to DreamWorks. DreamWorks' first animated project put into production was an animated adaptation of the 1956 classic, The Ten Commandments, something Katzenberg had always wanted to accomplish (he even tried suggesting this idea to then-CEO of Disney Michael Eisner, but the idea was turned down). When the film opened in Christmas 1998, it was a huge box-office smash, becoming the second non-Disney animated feature to pass the $100 million gross mark (behind Paramount/Nickelodeon's The Rugrats Movie) and established DreamWorks as a competitor to Walt Disney Animation Studios.

They weren't just into 2D animation, though. That same year they would release their first foray into the world of CGI animation, and that film was Antz.

Of course we all know that Disney is one of the leading forces in the world of animation. For 90 years now it has delivered a massive library of memorable characters and stories that we all have become accustomed to. But did you also know of the many things that happened for the past 9 decades? Read on and discover!

Chapter 1- Early Years

Walt Disney Animation Studios (formerly Walt Disney Feature Animation and Walt Disney Productions) began its life in 1923 as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, founded by Walt Disney and his elder brother Roy O. Disney, both Kansas City natives. Following a failed series of Laugh-O-Grams, the two brothers partnered together to produce the Alice Comedies, a series of silent short films that featured a live-action child actress in a world of cartoon characters. These were Walt's first successes in animation being distributed by Margaret J. Winkler's company, Winkler Pictures. Disney would also later make its first all-animated short film series, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, beginning in 1927. The studio was initially based in downtown Los Angeles in Kingswell Avenue storefront offices until it moved to a new building on a lot at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in 1926.

Walt Disney's first huge success came when following the end of the Oswald cartoons, he secretly teamed with animator Ub Iwerks to produce a series of cartoons starring a new character, Mickey Mouse. Steamboat Willie, which is known as Mickey's first well-known appearance wasn't the first cartoon to star Mickey Mouse. In 1928, Mickey made his debut in both Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho, both of which, I'm sorry to say, garnered only moderate impressions upon initial release. However, for Mickey's third cartoon, the aforementioned Steamboat Willie, Disney decided to use a sound track, with the help from musician Carl Stalling (who would later become one of the musical directors for Warner Bros.'s Classic Cartoon department) and businessman Pat Powers. As a result, it was the studio's first cartoon with sound, and it was an enormous immediate success when it opened in November 1928 at New York City's West 57th Theater. After Steamboat Willie, Mickey's series of sound cartoons immediately rose to popularity, which prompted disney to produce a second short series, Silly Symphonies, which started with 1929's The Skeleton Dance. Each Silly Symphony short was a one-shot centering around music or other particular themes. But for Walt and Roy, their success with shorts was only the beginning...

To be Continued....