Shrek 2 (DreamWorks Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, Pacific Data Images, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, February 12), my husband Charles and I watched the second film in the Shrek cycle, rather unimaginatively titled Shrek 2. The titles got more creative later on in the cycle; the third film was called Shrek the Third and the fourth was called Shrek Forever After. I’m looking forward to ordering the third and fourth Shrek movies (the third was made in 2007, the fourth in 2010, and though a fifth was planned from the get-go it still hasn’t been made). Part of the delay in making Shrek 5 was due to the sale of DreamWorks Animation to NBC Universal, and part of it (according to the Wikipedia page on the Shrek franchise) was due to the increased computing power needed to make these computer-animated films. As the Wikipedia page explains, “Despite the advances in computing power over the 2000’s decade, the increasing usage of novel techniques like global illumination, physics simulation, and 3-D demanded ever more CPU [central processing unit] hours to render the films. DreamWorks Animation noticed that every Shrek film took roughly twice the CPU hours than the previous film and thus labeled this trend as ‘Shrek's law.’ Similar to ‘Moore's law,’ Shrek's law says, ‘The CPU render hours needed to complete production on a theatrical sequel will double compared to the amount of time needed on the previous film.’” I was surprised at how literate both the first two Shrek films were and how many charming cultural-reference gags they contained, not only to other fairy tales (I mentioned in my comments on the first Shrek that it seemed to have a kinship to Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods for its creative mash-ups of classic fairy stories) but to bits and pieces of the mass culture that had little or nothing to do with the Grimms or their equivalents outside Germany.

I was also surprised at how many illustrious stars the producers of Shrek 2 got to join the franchise; the plot premise of Shrek 2 is that the newly married couple Shrek (Mike Myers) and Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) are invited to the land of “Far, Far Away” to attend a grand ball being given in their honor by her parents, King Harold and his Queen – and damned if they aren’t voiced by two legendary performers, John Cleese from Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and Julie Andrews from … you know. What’s more, in addition to the donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy in the first film (and who, of course, returns here!), there’s a new annoying talking-animal sidekick, Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), and when the big ball finally occurs it’s covered in a TV show announced by Joan Rivers … playing herself. Shrek 2 was both written and directed by larger committees than made the first one; Conrad Vernon gets a co-director credit along with Andrew Adamson and Kelly Asbury, who co-directed Shrek. The writing credits similarly grew, with Andrew Adamson getting acknowledged for both the original story and a share of the screenplay, the latter with Joe Stillman, J. David Stern and David N. Weiss, with Cody Cameron, Walt Dohrn, Chris Miller and David P. Smith getting “additional dialogue” credit and Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio and Roger S. H. Schulman winning nods for creating characters recycled from the first film that weren’t in the original 1990 children’s book Shrek! by William Steig. Steig was born in 1907 and joined the staff of The New Yorker as a cartoonist in 1930. He contributed original art to an auction organized by Langston Hughes to benefit the Scottsboro Boys’ legal defense fund in 1934. Steig didn’t start writing children’s books until 1968, at age 61; he achieved success with his third one, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, and published Shrek! in 1990, when he was 86. He went through four marriages, one of which produced the jazz-rock flutist Jeremy Steig (whom I remember from the 1960’s, when he led a band called Jeremy and the Satyrs), who played a voice role as the Pied Piper in the last Shrek film (so far), Shrek Forever After.

William Steig died October 3, 2003, just as Shrek 2 was about to be released, and the film’s closing credit includes a dedication to him. Asked what he thought about the first Shrek movie, which he lived long enough to see, Steig said, “It’s vulgar, it’s disgusting – and I loved it,” which isn’t the usual reaction writers have to movies based on their works. The setting of Shrek 2 in a country called “Far, Far Away” is an obvious nod to Star Wars and its nominal setting in “a galaxy far, far away,” and its biggest surprise is the appearance of a Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders) not as a beneficent force in the heroine’s life but quite the opposite: as a cold-blooded villainess eager to marry off Princess Fiona to her own son, Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), who’s designed to look as much like the comic-strip character Prince Valiant as the folks at DreamWorks Animation could get away with. The Fairy Godmother also runs a sweatshop factory where hundreds of exploited elves make spells for her – Shrek, the donkey and Puss in Boots crash her palace by claiming to be union organizers – and the smokestacks emit rainbow-colored smoke. The reason Shrek and Fiona want the Fairy Godmother’s help in the first place is because, not surprisingly, King Harold and his Queen aren’t exactly thrilled by having an ogre as a son-in-law. There are the predictable double-takes from the courtiers as Shrek and Fiona arrive looking like the ogres they are (though Harold and his missus don’t seem all that surprise that Fiona is now looking pretty ogre-esque herself, which may be due to something we learn about Harold much later). Shrek figures that if he can get hold of one of the Fairy Godmother’s spells and turn himself into a relatively normal human, he can win his in-laws’ affections and live happily ever after, despite the Fairy Godmother’s insistence that ogres never live happily ever after. At one point Shrek and company get put into a dungeon, only various other fairy-tale characters break them out in a quite amusing spoof of Mission: Impossible, complete with Lalo Schifrin’s famous theme song from both the TV series and the films.

Ultimately Shrek and the donkey grab the potion from the Fairy Godmother’s armamentarium and they both drink it; Shrek becomes a quite appealing if rather hefty bear-type human male (who frankly did far more for me than the overly twinky Prince Charming!) and the donkey becomes a noble white horse. They repair to the big ball, and there’s an effective suspense ending in which Prince Charming tries to kiss Fiona (who’s also reverted to human form after seeing Shrek as a homo sapiens), while Shrek attempts to escape the Fairy Godmother’s clutches and get to her to kiss her before Prince Charming does. The gimmick is that if the two kiss before midnight, they will remain in human form for the rest of their lives, while if they miss the deadline they will revert to ogre-dom and stay there. Ultimately Shrek and Fiona decide not to kiss until after midnight, so they presumably live happily ever after as ogres, Eddie Murphy’s white horse becomes a donkey again, King Harold reverts to his original status as a frog (the big secret I mentioned above), and the Fairy Godmother literally disintegrates into teardrops. Then a post-credits sequence follows, a quite amusing and entertaining spoof of American Idol that, like the karaoke scene at the end of the first Shrek, only appears on the home-video versions. It features various cast members performing songs like Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” The Trampps’ “Disco Inferno” (one of the few disco songs I actually liked at the height of the craze in the late 1970’s), Styx’s “Mr. Roboto,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf,” Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy,” Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar,” Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling” (which I can remember was popular at the same time as Ringo Starr’s “Oh My My,” so I kept getting them mixed up), Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” her dad’s hit “My Way” and The Romantics’ “What I Like About You.”

These bizarre medleys of classic songs from the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s are among the most fun parts of these movies, and the American Idol spoof (which featured Simon Cowell as himself, though Rick Riso sang for him on “My Way” – they would give that bizarre hymn to egomania to Simon Cowell, or at least his voice double!) was so elaborate there was a whole separate credit roll for it. Charles said after it was all over that Shrek 2 was more of a musical than Shrek – though there were plenty of intriguing musical interludes in the first film, too – and the first two Shreks hold up as quality family entertainment and make me look forward to catching up to the other two films in the cycle.