DreamWorks Face

Origin: a pattern, not a picture¶

The DreamWorks Face is a smug half-smile with one eyebrow raised and the other furrowed, aimed directly out of the frame. What makes it a meme is not any single image but the observation behind it: DreamWorks Animation puts near-identical versions of that expression on character after character, film after film, particularly in its promotional art.

The observation is far older than most people assume. The earliest known online instance is a Flickr upload titled “Dreamworks Face” on March 30, 2009 — a stick-figure comparison of Pixar’s poster style against DreamWorks’ — which has since drawn more than 383,000 views. A DeviantArt collage followed on June 12, 2009, lining up Shrek, Alex from Madagascar and Po from Kung Fu Panda wearing the identical smirk; later edits appended Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon and Megamind. By September 27, 2009 a second Flickr user was already using the exact phrase “the DreamWorks face” as a label.

Codification¶

Three steps turned a scattered joke into a named trope:

• June 8, 2010 — a Reddit post applies the label outside animation entirely, to a live-action television character, proving the expression had become a recognisable type.
• September 13, 2010 — a DeviantArt parody poster. Its author explained the motivation bluntly: a Monsters vs. Aliens advert in the weekly Best Buy flyer kept running the same face.
• March 24, 2011 — TV Tropes creates a “DreamWorks Face” page, describing the clever asymmetrical smirk, the crooked eyebrows and the stare-down coming at you from the promo posters.

Once it had a name, spotting it became a game with a checklist, and collages compiling a dozen or more examples became the standard form.

The catalogue¶

Collages typically draw on Shrek, Shark Tale, Madagascar, Over the Hedge, Bee Movie, Kung Fu Panda, Monsters vs. Aliens, How to Train Your Dragon, Megamind, The Road to El Dorado, Trolls and The Boss Baby. The pattern is strongest on posters and box art rather than inside the films, which points at its real source: it is a marketing decision about how to sell an animated comedy in a single frame, not a directorial tic.

The animators’ anecdote¶

The most-repeated claim about the face is that DreamWorks’ own animators dislike it. It traces to a single Tumblr post from 2015, in which a user relayed a conversation with an unnamed head animator: everyone at the studio knew about the DreamWorks Face and complained about it, but marketing kept asking for it anyway. That post accumulated more than 150,000 notes and is the version of the story most people have encountered.

It is secondhand and anonymous. DreamWorks has never commented publicly on the meme, and no named animator or executive is on record about it, so the claim is best treated as an anecdote rather than an established fact.

Meaning and legacy¶

In use, “DreamWorks face” describes or captions any smug, self-satisfied smirk — animated, live-action, human or pet. It functions as both a reaction and a diagnosis: calling an expression a DreamWorks Face is a way of saying someone looks entirely too pleased with themselves.

The meme kept regenerating because the studio kept supplying material; a widely shared August 2022 post argued DreamWorks had finally moved on to a successor expression, an “awkward smile,” and drew 11,000 likes making the case. What makes it unusual is its subject. Almost every meme is about a moment; this one is about a house style. It taught a mass audience to read a studio’s marketing tics, with the result that a generation can identify an animation company from a single eyebrow — the same catalogue that produced Megamind, Shrek and Kowalski.