There’s no shock in learning that another Madagascar is on the way — how about a spin-off? No, that’s not really mind-blowing, either, but it was announced at DreamWorks Animation’s Comic-Con panel this lovely Thursday, whereat Madagascar 3 co-director Tom McGrath said that The Penguins of Madagascar will arrive in 2015. This was then followed by an all-the-more-obvious announcement of Kung Fu Panda 3; nothing has been said in regards to either project, to the chagrin of the curious.

My investment in either is in equal supply, so let’s move on to the much more interesting Me and My Shadow. We had been told, back in January, that Bill Hader, Kate Hudson, and Josh Gad would headline the project, a fantasy picture which would serve as a mixture of hand-drawn animation and, in the “human” world, regular CGI. I love that kind of approach — if only because this old-fashioned (and superior) style of animation gets a little more light once again — so I’m all the more thankful to hear that such a process is still in the cards. Alessandro Carloni is directing Shadow, and we can expect it to hit in the spring of 2014.

The exhibit also brought some footage from next year’s The Croods, which already earned it a few comparisons to Brave; we can only hope the storytelling is a step-up. The film follows a family of cavemen, exiled from their secluded habitat, who encounter Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a standout figure in this pre-historic period “because he has ideas.” Visually-speaking, Croods‘ enviornment starts out as a “dusty, monochromatic world [that] explodes into a wildly lush and dangerous landscape filled with giant animals and vibrantly colorful plant life.”

Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Catherine Keener, Clark Duke, and Cloris Leachman all co-star in The Croods, which Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon) and Kirk DeMicco (Space Chimps) are directing for a March 22nd, 2013 release.

Do DreamWorks Animation’s plans for the next few years have you optimistic?

Source: EW