Dreamworks #5: Shrek

Shrek - 8.3/10

This is it. The movie that changed everything. This film marks the biggest paradigm shift in animated features since The Little Mermaid brought them back into the mainstream. True, Toy Story had already proven that computer animation was a viable method for filmmaking, but Shrek showed us it was the way of the future.

Even more than that, it redefined what an animated film could be, and who it could be for. The level of adult humor and storytelling that is so common today was groundbreaking at the time. It was one of the first big-time animated films that really wasn’t for kids. Oh sure, plenty of kids saw it and liked it, but it wasn’t made for them.

The tongue-in-cheek pastiche of fairy tale convention was hardly new, but Shrek took a much different tone with it than most others did or even still do today. The production team really understood that for humor to be most effective, you don’t call attention to your jokes. Rather, you just sort of let them happen naturally and move on. That’s the big difference between this film, which still has a lot of big gags and plenty of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smaller ones, and a film like Happily N’ever After, which is constantly reminding you what it’s making fun of, and that they’re doing their best to be wacky at every turn.

Also, for perhaps the first time I was completely in favor of the stunt casting. I cannot imagine this movie being half as good without the likes of Mike Myers, John Lithgow and Eddie Murphy. With Murphy I’ve heard mixed reactions, with some people saying he talks too much about random nonsense. I don’t understand why; that’s the joke. And the sheer amount of personality he infuses into Donkey is quite honestly one of my favorite parts of the movie.

That all being said, it’s time to take a trip down nitpicky lane. First of all, I was not a fan of their choice to use popular music of the time in the soundtrack. For one thing, it really dates the movie (Smash Mouth in particular), but it also doesn’t add the level of feeling that the parts with original scoring have, or even the more timeless songs like Hallelujah. 

Secondly, for a film that parodies fairy tale conventions, they sure use a lot of fairy tale conventions. I’m sorry, but the “twist” ending with Fiona remaining an Ogre (spoiler alert?) could be seen from a mile off, from the moment she first recited the poem about “Love’s true form”. Okay, I like the message about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, but at this point you’ve become exactly the kind of movie you were making fun of half an hour ago.

Lastly, the whole “overheard conversation misunderstanding” thing that’s been done a million times and stopped being an interesting plot device seventy years ago. Eugh, really, guys? And what bothered me even when I first saw it in high school was this: Why would Fiona think that Shrek, an ogre, would care that she turns into an ogre at night? Or that he would think less of her for it? It makes absolutely no sense and just makes for forced drama – which pulls on my gag reflex coming so soon after the forced, awkward romance. 

I was never really a big fan of the whole “dance party ending” craze that was going around at that time, either. And sometimes the animation of Shrek interacting with things (when he's eating or fighting) was a little clunky, but they were still perfecting things so I'll cut them some slack.

All that aside, this is still a really enjoyable film with some solid laughs, a good deconstruction of the fairy tale genre in general, and most importantly it opened the door for a whole new type of animated film that would come to dominate the first decade of the 21^st century. And so far the second as well.