Walt Dohrn

Walt Dohrn, born in Orange County in 1970, is a writer, director, animator, musician and voice actor, and he has worked in most of those capacities on the same films. He wrote, directed and storyboarded on the second season of SpongeBob SquarePants before settling at DreamWorks, where he signed a studio deal in 2020.

His one great performance is Rumpelstiltskin in Shrek Forever After, a small, wheedling, genuinely spiteful villain voiced with far more relish than a fourth sequel had any right to expect. He had already supplied assorted voices in Shrek the Third, and that pattern, the crew member who fills in the odd parts, became the shape of his career.

Trolls is the franchise he owns. He co-directed the 2016 film, directed the sequels, and voices a scattering of characters in each of them, including Cloud Guy, Smidge, Fuzzbert and King Peppy. Cloud Guy is the most Dohrn thing in the films: a joke that keeps wandering into scenes it has no business in, performed by the man in charge of the scene.

Elsewhere he turns up in the small print of most DreamWorks releases, with bit voices in Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Penguins of Madagascar, the Boss Baby films, Abominable, The Bad Guys and Orion and the Dark. He is co-directing Shrek 5 with Conrad Vernon.