It would have been easy for DreamWorks Animation get lost in the big-studio shuffle over the past ten years, and in some ways it has. While Disney and Pixar have gone through ups and downs, they remain a perma-brand more or less as long as they can keep churning out Frozen or Toy Story movies. Sony has made both theatrical and streaming events out of a more frenzied, inventive approach to computer animation with their Spider-Verse films and KPop Demon Hunters.

Meanwhile, former upstart DreamWorks has experienced a stark contrast to those animation boom times of the 2000s, where the sheer novelty of computer-animated blockbusters meant that some of the company’s worst (Shark Tale), least memorable (Over the Hedge), or strangest (Bee Movie) projects would cruise to box office success as a matter of course. These days, DreamWorks isn’t even the only animation art distributed by Universal Pictures; they also have the Illumination movies led by the Despicable Me series, which routinely outgross almost the entire DreamWorks stable. The latter, by contrast, sometimes feels like a bunch of leftovers. In 2025, their biggest lineup in ages consisted of a cartoon closely adapted from a beloved children’s book series (Dog Man); a sequel to a cartoon adapted from a beloved children’s book series (The Bad Guys 2); a live-action remake of a cartoon, photocopying their own success (How to Train Your Dragon); and a low-budget extension of their little-kid TV series Gabby’s Dollhouse. These may have been theatrical releases — events to certain pint-sized audiences — but they feel like the unmistakable products of the streaming era: IP, spinoffs, remakes, destined to hit the Netflix and/or Peacock charts.

But in between this listless brand maintenance, DreamWorks has also changed up their house style, most evident in their new cartoon Forgotten Island, which is not based on a children’s book series, or a TV show, or another DreamWorks movie. The cynical thing to say would be that it’s based largely on the success of KPop Demon Hunters, whose neon-accented, freewheeling, anime-conversant style is going to be looming large for years to come. But to be fair, DreamWorks began its stylistic overhaul way before that movie hit Netflix, with more painterly textures on The Bad Guys, its Puss in Boots sequel, and The Wild Robot, their most acclaimed film in years.

Forgotten Island is more manic than any of those movies, though they all, even Robot, have their bombastic chase scenes. Here, though, form better follows content; the lead characters Raissa (Liza Soberano) and Jo (H.E.R.) are lifelong besties who spend plenty of time gassing each other up, from their first pre-teen meeting through their high school graduation. The movie’s colorful, caffeinated style — heavy on the visual accent marks — reflects a bangle-heavy, iconographic friendship-bracelet aesthetic, and takes cues from both its unacknowledged time period (it seems to take place at least in part during the ’90s, or at very least is inspired heavily by ’90s songs and culture) and setting (the girls grow up in the Philippines). For years, DreamsWorks movies were full of characters who couldn’t stop yammering, as if attempting to fill every silence with exposition, jokes, anything to keep their well-paid celeb voices running. Forgotten Island finally visualizes that sensibility.

Raissa and Jo have been each other’s world for years, initially bonding over a shared love of mythology about the forgotten island of Nakali. But Raissa, an overachiever with strict if loving parents, is headed to college in America, while Jo, more of a goof-off, languishes in a series of fast-food jobs. On their last night together, the girls actually find a portal to the real Nakali — and wake up the next morning with no memory of their wild night spent there. In order to get home, they have to retrace their memory-blanked steps, lending the movie more than a bit of The Hangover to go along with its Superbad/Booksmart dynamic, all animated in a kind of low-angle music-video hyperpop frenzy.

There are touches of a videogame sensibility in this animation style, too, which spills over to the movie’s sometimes overworked plotting. Though the emotional core of the story is strong, directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado sometimes appear to be assigning their engaging characters mission-based busywork as they dart around from region to region on Nakali: Go to this place, retrieve this object from this guy, bring these characters along as powered-up sidekicks. The side characters, especially an eager-to-please “were-dog” voiced by Dave Franco, are often very funny in design, dialogue, and vocal performance, but their fast friendships with the heroines threaten to undermine the latter’s decade-long bond. This is really a YA story, augmented with what sometimes feel like kid-movie concessions to the idea that animation has to appeal to five-year-olds, too, no matter its actual themes or characters.

That’s understandable, though; younger viewers who stare wide-eyed at kid-targeted approximations of teenagers will positively feast on the likes of Forgotten Island. It’s at once a madcap fantasy of teen besties and a bittersweet acknowledgment that life sometimes pulls those intense friendships apart, at least to some degree. The DreamWorks team hasn’t quite mastered the Pixar art of crystallizing its themes into a single moment or image that decimates the audience’s emotional defenses. (To be fair, Pixar has missed this plenty of times themselves in recent years.) But they’re getting closer, and at one point are able to wring surprising amount of pathos from a surface area as small as a post-it note. It’s a neat counterpoint to the movie’s visual maximalism.

Those visuals, though, guarantee that unlike a lot of the recent DreamWorks output, Forgotten Island doesn’t feel like a streaming project in waiting. It’s worth seeing on the big screen — and not just because it’s the only kid-friendly movie for the next four weekends or so. All told, this is the best DreamWorks cartoon in a decade or more.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.