Soumitra Saxena leads the tech behind DreamWorks’ biggest films

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Soumitra Saxena works on one animated feature at a time. As a Lead Technical Director at DreamWorks Animation, he leads technology development for that production and helps guide the team of technical directors responsible for carrying it from concept to finished film, a process that typically takes several years from initial design to theatrical release.

More than a decade of credited work

Saxena has spent more than ten years at DreamWorks Animation, and his name appears in the technical crew credits of several of the studio’s productions, including Academy Award-nominated The Boss Baby, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and, most recently, The Bad Guys 2. Earlier in his career, he helped bring Universal Scene Description, a pipeline standard now widely used across the animation industry, into DreamWorks’ workflow for How to Train Your Dragon.

The role sits at the point where a film’s artistic direction meets the software that has to produce it at the scale of a full theatrical release. An animator or art director can design how a movie should look. Getting that look onto the screen consistently across thousands of shots and a production schedule measured in years rather than months is a technical problem, and it’s the one Saxena is responsible for solving on each film he takes on. Fewer technical directors get to help shape a studio’s pipeline than get to operate one someone else already built, and that distinction is roughly what separates a lead role from a supporting one.

A different set of technical problems

That responsibility has become more complicated in Saxena’s more recent films, as DreamWorks and other studios have moved away from photorealistic rendering and toward a more stylized visual approach, an industry shift generally referred to as non-photorealistic rendering, or NPR. The approach traces back to Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which showed that a comic-book-influenced look could succeed at feature scale and pulled other studios toward similar visual territory. Where the previous generation of computer animation aimed to mimic real-world light, texture, and movement as closely as possible, the newer approach keeps the artist’s hand visible in the finished frame, favoring flatter shading and bolder linework over strict physical accuracy.

“It’s a stylized version of animated filmmaking that DreamWorks has directly applied to its films in the last few years, and something I’ve very much been a part of.”

Saxena names two productions in which he says that the work has played out directly. The Bad Guys 2, released by DreamWorks in August 2025, in which he is credited as one of the film’s technical directors, applied the stylized approach to its heist-comedy visuals. Puss In Boots : The Last Wish (2022) , a spinoff built around Antonio Banderas’s character from the Shrek franchise, was another production in which he says the same technical direction is being carried forward. Soumitra is currently leading Technical Direction on Donkey, currently scheduled for a 2028 release.

Implementing a stylistic shift like this is not simply a creative call made once and handed down. Rendering pipelines built for photorealism do not automatically know how to hold a flat color field or fake a hand-drawn line; that capability has to be engineered into the pipeline before an animator can use it on a deadline. Someone also has to keep an entire team of technical directors aligned on the same technical approach while a production moves through its schedule. That coordination, on this production and on the pipeline work that came before it, is what falls to a Lead Technical Director.

Whether the trend will continue to define the next several years of feature animation or give way to something else remains an open question within the industry. What is already established is a body of work that runs across more than a decade at one of animation’s largest studios, from a pipeline standard adopted on How to Train Your Dragon to the stylized rendering carried through The Bad Guys 2 and, according to Saxena, into Donkey, all of it running through his desk as a Lead Technical Director.