DreamWorks has had a good run over almost three decades. How to Train Your Dragon made me cry in a theater full of kids, twice. Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, the whole bunch. But none of them, not one, scored what Forgotten Island just scored on Rotten Tomatoes. Per ComingSoon.net, the new movie now holds the studio's best reviews ever, edging past Shrek and How to Train Your Dragon.

Let that sink in for a second. The list of great DreamWorks movies is long, and the ones at the top have had years, decades in Shrek's case, to pile up glowing reviews and the occasional late-arriving reassessment. For a new release to walk in and top the chart on day one, that's not normal. In my gut it feels like the kind of thing that happens once in a studio's lifetime, if that, and I'll admit that's just my read on it, not a statistic I can point to. Either way, rare.

I haven't seen it yet, which is the part that's killing me. I've been doing this long enough to know a Tomatometer number is a snapshot, not a verdict. But it's a snapshot of a lot of critics agreeing, and when that many people whose job is to be tired of animated movies all land on "actually, this one's special," I clear my evening. I did the same math on the last Shaun the Sheep movie and it paid off. I'll watch almost anything made with real care, and a record like this usually means care got poured in by the bucket.

The fun part is the company it's beating. Shrek basically built DreamWorks' identity, the snark-and-heart formula that defined them against Pixar's polish. How to Train Your Dragon was them proving they could do sincerity as well as anyone alive. If Forgotten Island out-reviewed both, it found something that works even better, and I'm genuinely curious what that something is. I've avoided the trailer beyond a glance because, as I keep telling anyone who'll listen, I like walking into things cold.

So consider this me clearing a spot on the calendar. If you've got kids, or you're just a person who likes animated movies made for actual humans, this sounds like the one to catch in a theater while the crowd's still there. A full room for an animated movie has the same energy a horror crowd does, minus the screaming.

I'll report back once I've seen it. If it beats Dragon on my own personal chart too, that's a whole different conversation, and Toothless doesn't lose that fight easily.