WATCH: DreamWorks Documentary ‘Shooting For The Moon’ Highlights History Of Studio From Artists’ Perspective

Last year, Dreamworks celebrated its 30th year as a studio. In that time its impact on animation has been significant, as has the company’s approach to its output. Beginning as a direct rival to Disney in the mid-1990s, Dreamworks evolved into a studio with its own identity separate from them, and with recent films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish and The Wild Robot, they have re-emerged as one of the most exciting studios in American animation.

Marking that change and growth is a new documentary, Dreamworks: Shooting For The Moon (original French title: Dreamworks:La Tete Dans La Lune). The two-and-a-half independently-produced documentary premiered online today and can be viewed in full below:

Directed and financed by professional animators and podcasters Jean Lesur and Robin Thiriet, the documentary collects archival footage from the studio’s past and features interviews with Dreamworks alum like Simon Otto and Kristof Serrand, as well as current employees like Pierre Perifel, who is directing the studio’s upcoming feature The Bad Guys 2.

Cartoon Brew caught up with Lesur and Thiriet to get into their intent behind the documentary and what discoveries they made along the way.

Cartoon Brew: What got you both into animation?

Robin Thiriet: As a kid, I grew up with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. My childhood friend and I were obsessed with recreating the lightsaber effect. We eventually got access to After Effects, and from that moment on, I fell in love with the craft. I spent all my free time experimenting with my uncle’s camera. While I was always drawn to vfx, it was during school that I discovered animation, and with it, the endless possibilities of storytelling and worldbuilding. That initial passion soon turned into true love.

Jean Lesur: Like a lot of people from my generation I grew up watching Disney and Dreamworks movies and playing video games. When I was about 12 or 13 years old I mentioned to a colleague of my mother that I was interested in cgi and he introduced me to Blender. I started learning it on my own as a generalist and eventually specialized in animation.

How did the idea for the documentary come about?

Lesur: Robin first had the idea to interview Denis Couchon because we both knew people who worked with him. We started doing research on his career to prepare the questions and it slowly occurred to us that his story was tied to the story of Dreamworks. I don’t know who said the word “documentary” first, but at some point we decided to switch the focus from Denis to Dreamworks as a whole.
We had no experience doing something of that scale before. We had done a few interviews for the podcast, which helped a lot to prepare the questions and for the edit but this was definitely a much bigger challenge. I would say that having worked on movie and tv productions before really helped us organize.

Thiriet: While researching for Denis’s interview, we realized something surprising: no one had ever made a documentary about Dreamworks from the perspective of the artists themselves. There were plenty of tv reportages, behind-the-scenes videos, and Youtube featurettes, but they were all very film-focused, often overlooking the individuals and the unique journeys they each took to get there. At first, I somewhat naively suggested that we could make a documentary ourselves, one that would include Denis’s interview and allow the artists to speak alongside us, to unravel the story from their point of view. Once we committed to that idea, the scope of the project quickly grew.

[In terms of getting guests] Kristof [Serrand] was one of our teachers at Gobelins school in Annecy. I had met Simon Otto in 2017 while working as a senior animator on That Christmas where he was the director, and I had contacted Julien Bocabeille when I wanted to work on Playmobil: The Movie and I had also worked with Kapil Sharma on Entergalactic, where he was the animation director. The hardest to reach was Pierre Perifel, who was in the middle of production on The Bad Guys 2. Thankfully, Simon really pushed to help us get in touch, and we eventually made it happen. Pierre’s journey through three canceled projects and his role in the studio’s creative revival made him a key voice in the story.

What new skills did you have to learn through the process?

Lesur: From the first idea to full completion it took about a year of work, on top of our regular jobs in animation. The research part was a big one and took about three to four months. The interviews were spread over four months. The writing, edit, sound and visuals took about six months, with all these periods of work overlapping.

I would say the biggest skill I learned was writing. We had so many hours of rush from the interviews, we had to make a lot of choices as to what we wanted to keep, what angle we wanted to take. The documentary tells a story of Dreamworks from the point of view of the artists we talked to and with our perception of what they told us. The writing was a big part of the work and it happened in steps: we wrote a timeline first, then after the interviews we wrote a first script, then we rewrote each chapter in detail after Robin did a first rough edit, and then the edit itself was like another rewrite.

Thiriet: There’s a saying: you write a film three times, once with the script, once during the shoot, and once in the edit. That turned out to be very true for us. Our process was very collaborative but intentionally asynchronous. We didn’t interfere with each other’s creative flow. By the end, the editing became so dense and layered that we agreed on the major narrative blocks in advance, and Jean rewrote all the final voice-overs, and picked the part in the interview that mattered cleanly and precisely.

Editing is definitely the skill I sharpened the most during this project. I’m really proud of what we achieved. And for the nerds out there, I edited the whole thing in DaVinci Resolve, which was incredibly stable and opened up so many possibilities. Working in that software was a joy.

Did you have to interact directly with the studio at all? What did they make of it?

Lesur: We did not have any direct contact with Dreamworks. We wanted to have the point of view of the artists so we contacted them directly and we sent the questions in advance to make sure there would not be any NDA issues or questions and subjects they were uncomfortable with or unwilling to talk about.

Jeffrey Katzenberg is an interesting figure who has a reputation for being anti-artist, but in the documentary animators are very complimentary of him. Did that surprise you?

Lesur: I think we had the same preconceived ideas as the general public about Katzenberg. To prepare the documentary I read the book by Nicole LaPorte, The Men Who Would Be King, and there were already some things in it about Katzenberg that changed my perspective, but when talking to the artists about him it became clear that his public image and who he was with his employees were two very different things. That actually motivated us to include the segment where the animators talk about him in the documentary.

Thiriet: As Pierre says in the documentary, from the outside Katzenberg is often seen as the devil himself. Based on the media, articles, and industry stories, I also had a pretty negative image of him before we started working on the film. But as we dug deeper into our research, we started to see a different side of the story. Jean read The Men Who Would Be King, and I remember him coming to me saying, “Did you know that…?” It kept happening. We were both surprised by what we were learning. The image of Katzenberg as this cold executive didn’t fully line up with what people who worked with him were actually saying.

The interviews really helped. We started hearing consistent things from different people, even across different time periods and studios. They all said that from the inside, Katzenberg actually had a deep respect for artists and the craft of animation. That was something we hadn’t really heard before. It felt like an important and lesser-known part of the story. At that point, we thought, maybe we should include this other side of him. Maybe this is something worth highlighting. We decided to give him a dedicated moment in the film. The “Decline” chapter felt like the right place to offer that reflection, a kind of farewell that acknowledged his full complexity, not just the popular narrative.

How else has making the doc changed your perception of Dreamworks?

Lesur: For me there are two main things that I learned. The first one was how much PDI was instrumental in the success of Dreamworks, and I feel it’s something that’s almost never talked about. The second one was when talking to the artists who are still there today, it really seemed like a place where you would want to work as an animator. And listening to them talk about the future in a way that I did not expect was really nice.

Thiriet: A few things really stood out for me. First, I never realized just how much of a golden age the 1990s were for animators. Listening to them talk about that time made me realize how unique it was. They were laying the foundation for an entire industry. Nothing was standardized. Everyone was figuring things out from scratch, trying their own approaches, and pushing boundaries. It was a time of pure invention. I don’t think we’ll ever see that kind of creative freedom and experimentation again on such a scale.

Second, I was shocked by how little recognition PDI gets. No one outside the industry really talks about them, yet they were the ones producing hit after hit while Glendale was struggling with big flops. PDI essentially kept the company afloat for years. They faced a lot of resistance as pioneers in cg, even some backlash, but they kept innovating regardless. It’s tragic how they were eventually shut down. The way that studio operated, with such a strong culture of experimentation and collaboration, is something you rarely see today.

Finally, what moved me the most was the love that came through in every single interview. Every person we spoke to was genuinely passionate, deeply connected to the craft, and proud of what they contributed. You can really see the difference between moments when executives were steering the ship versus when artists were making the creative decisions. That contrast shows up clearly in the films and even in the box office results. It’s a reminder of how much heart goes into animation, and how fragile that creative balance can be.

Dreamworks have undoubtedly helped shape the current animation landscape. Do you think it’s for the better?

Lesur: I think so, yes. Even if they went a different way than they first thought, even if they made mistakes along the way, I feel like they brought something else to the animation industry, something that was different from Disney and I think something that Disney still hasn’t managed to do themselves. And I think that Dreamworks doing that in the early 2000s and having so much success led the way for others to make something different in animation and to go even further than Dreamworks.

Thiriet: What they accomplished is remarkable. Dreamworks really led the way and opened doors for others. Some of their films are clearly commercial, and you can feel that in the tone and in how audiences responded. But when you look at the heart of films like Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, or How to Train Your Dragon, you see something special. These were moments where everything aligned, with the right people, the right timing, and the ambition to create something fresh and different.

They broke away from the traditional princess-and-fairytale formula and helped broaden what animation could be in the eyes of the general public. That shift was important. They expanded the emotional and narrative range of what mainstream animation could explore. They proved that animation could succeed outside the classic formulas, and that impact is still being felt today.