‘DreamWorks Animation: The Exhibition, Journey From Sketch to Screen’ arrives at the MAC

After a long journey, “DreamWorks Animation: The Exhibition, Journey From Sketch to Screen” has finally made its way to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.

The exhibit focusing on the maker of animated films such as “Shrek” and “How to Train Your Dragon” originally was scheduled to open at the MAC last Saturday, but a series of roadblocks at various major ports forced organizers to postpone. The exhibit will now open Sunday and continue through Sept. 11.

Following a string of stops in major international cities over the past five years, Spokane will mark the exhibition’s first U.S. engagement, as well as its longest stay in any one location, as The Spokesman-Review reported last October.

The exhibit, created by a museum in Australia, had been in storage for much of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it’s making its first trek to the U.S. and will be making its American debut in Spokane.

Shipping the exhibition – more than 350 pieces of memorabilia among other display items – from Canberra, Australia, to Spokane was no easy feat, MAC executive director Wesley Jessup said during a news conference Thursday. But the final product has been worth the wait.

The exhibition is unusual, Jessup said, in that it highlights the creative process rather than the final product.

“It’s about experimentation and creativity in a way that is unusual for a museum exhibition,” he said. “Normally … you see the painting, the masterpiece on the wall, but for this exhibition, they really get behind the scenes … we’re able to understand how these wonderful movies are made and see how they develop.”

Jessup also expressed his appreciation for the focus the exhibition places on the individual artists.

“If you’ve taken an art history course at some point, you know, so many of the medieval artists were just nameless,” Jessup said. With this exhibit, DreamWorks Animation artists are getting their due. “I love that the show highlights them and brings them out,” he added. “They’re not well-known, but their contributions are the building blocks for these movies – the ideas of these sketches coming to life is just magical.”

Created by ACMI, the museum of screen culture in Melbourne, Australia, the exhibition is a multimedia exploration of DreamWorks’ approach to animation, art, technology and storytelling.

Visitors will experience the creative process behind more than 25 years of DreamWorks animation (“Shrek,” “Madagascar,” “How to Train Your Dragon,” “Kung Fu Panda”) through the lens of four major sections: character, story, world and the drawing room. The first three segments will explore the “journey from sketch to screen,” while the “drawing room” offers visitors a chance to make their own hand-drawn, animated movie sequences using software developed for DreamWorks animators on the exhibit’s digital animation desk kiosks.

The exhibition was in storage for most of the coronavirus pandemic.

“When COVID shut everything down a couple of years ago, it really threw a lot of museums,” Jessup said, including the MAC and ACMI.

Schedules were in flux across the board, but, fortunately, the chaos ended up clearing a path for the MAC to reach out to ACMI.

“But thanks to their amazing help and being able to work with them, (we got) it on the slow boat,” Jessup said. “We’re just so thrilled that it’s here and glad that the MAC gets to be the first museum in the United States to host it.”

The shipping and installation processes proved similarly demanding.

“One of the key things is trying to convey to our partner presenters just the sheer amount of content and material and the kinds of shows that ACMI creates are very layered and multidisciplinary,” said Anat Meiri, ACMI’s head of touring, mentioning the various kinds of props and experience pieces that go into each exhibit. “So it’s quite an intense and time-consuming hang that we’ve compressed it into a very short time.”

As far as local economic impact, this exhibit could bring anywhere between $15 million and $30 million into Spokane’s economy, Visit Spokane president and CEO Meg Winchester said at the same news conference. Winchester expects the exhibition to draw visitors from all over the Northwest.

“It’s going to be so wonderful and special for people in the community,” Jessup said. “We’re so thrilled it’s here.”