In the world of media, it seems like every animated film is created by Disney, but other successful companies are often overlooked. You’ve got some of the most recent and popular movies, Moana, Cars 3, and Zootopia, but it might surprise you to hear that other successful animated films like Kung Fu Panda, How to Train your Dragon, and The Boss Baby, are actually Dreamworks, not Disney.

Dreamworks is a much younger company than Disney and has only been around about twenty-three years. This may seem like a long time until you compare it to Disney which has been around since 1923. You can imagine the pressure Dreamworks was under as they tried to compete against one of the most successful businesses in the world, but they have held their ground. Dreamworks has been a very successful business and ended up selling their company to Paramount Pictures in 2006.

If you were to compare Disney and Dreamworks revenue from top movies, you can find that Dreamworks actually did better in bringing in money than Disney on some of their top movies. Top box office earnings can be found at Box Office Mojo and this website did a phenomenal job at comparing the revenues between the two different companies. Some of the top rankings of revenue for Disney were Moana at number three, Zootopia at number two, and Frozen at number one which brought in a gross of $400,738,009 during its time in theaters. Comparably, some of the top box office revenues for Dreamworks were Shrek at number three, Shrek the Third at number two, and Shrek 2 at number one. Shrek 2 came out in 2004 and brought in a gross of $441,226,247, which is $40,488,238 more than Frozen.

So why animated movies? In the book, Eye on Art: Walt Disney, by Barbara Sheen, she quoted Disney saying, “Of all our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the universal language.” It doesn’t matter which company made which movie or brought in more money. These companies all had the same goal in mind. They wanted to bring joy and happiness to an audience in a way that could be understood by people of all different backgrounds and cultures. Movies have the power of getting the point across in a way that almost anyone can understand. These movies are the ones we grow up on as kids and quote into our teenage years, and these companies are going to continue to leave their footprint on generations to come.