“A film of marvels if not quite a marvellous film”: Shrek reviewed in 2001

The back-and-forth one-upmanship between Disney/Pixar and PDI/DreamWorks continues in Shrek. Two years ago, the rivals played scissors-paper-stone and both came out with insect-themed animations: Antz and A Bug’s Life. Now, as if to pay back the swipes Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove levelled at DreamWorks’ The Road to El Dorado, CGI animation specialist PDI, which is backed by DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg, has delivered a movie that escalates the conflict by including digs at most of the sacred cows of the Disney backlist, with humiliating cameos for the Seven Dwarfs, the Snow White magic mirror, Pinocchio, Cinderella and Robin Hood. 

Based on a children’s book by William Steig, Shrek is a film of marvels if not quite a marvellous film. It adopts a gag-filled approach, akin to that of Pixar’s Toy Story films, to tell a simple story that has room for as many incidentals as a page of a Mad Magazine movie satire. Though it has a lovely vintage-illustration look, with a sylvan swamp and a wonderfully grotesque castle, the film sets itself against classicism from the outset, as the ogre Shrek wipes his arse on a page from a fairytale. Later, the film hauls in specially adapted versions of well-known songs – ranging from Greg Camp’s ‘All Star’ to the Monkees’ ‘I’m a Believer’ – to sustain raucous musical numbers and stages fights as parodies of WWF wrestling or Bruckheimer-Simpson-style action sequences.

Like Antz, Shrek has its share of celebrity casting. While the aggressive but mournful Shrek is a sympathetic character, it is initially off-putting that Mike Myers has given him the voice of the Scottish slob Fat Bastard from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, probably the least appealing of his comic creations. And though Eddie Murphy delivers some inspired schtick as Shrek’s sidekick Donkey, it’s very much his usual act (as already heard for Disney in Mulan). After a reel or so, Myers and Murphy do differentiate these vocal characterisations from their previous efforts, and the expected sentimental streak plays effectively as Shrek and Fiona, the princess he rescues, move towards a romance.

With its constant stream of fairytale-related gags (Shrek’s instruction to the Seven Dwarfs as they invade his home is “get the dead chick off the table!”) and routines (the magic mirror offers Farquaad, the ruler of the film’s fairytale setting, a Blind Date-style run-down of available princesses), Shrek covers a great deal of ground, from the charmingly goofy to the vicious. A torture dungeon scene riffs on nursery rhymes as Farquaad tries to get information out of a gingerbread man by dipping his limbs in milk until they drop off, only to be distracted by old, old questions (“Do you know the muffin man?”). The nasty edge to this scene is ultimately filed away when the limping gingerbread man shows up to see the villain get his deserved come-uppance. It’s a mark of the care taken by directors Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson that many walk-on characters seem as substantial as the leads.

Connoisseurs of CGI will note significant advances in the form, with wonderfully textured grass, flame, velvet (Fiona’s dress is a triumph) and water. There are even a few moments (such as a parody of those action sequences in which figures run away from explosions in extreme slow motion) that you almost take for granted until you realise how difficult they are to achieve in any kind of animation. Strangely, the move towards nearly photo-realistic human and animal characters that seems to be edging the medium closer to an apotheosis might mean an end to films like this. If CGI can create exact mimesis, there surely won’t be any need for its use as a replacement for traditional cell animation when its major application will be in producing movies that seem as ‘real’ as live action.