Shrek (DreamWorks Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, Pacific Data Images, 2001)

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

Last night (Sunday, February 11) my husband Charles and I screened a DVD copy of the 2001 movie Shrek, which somehow had eluded us before now even though it became a major cultural icon. It was so old a disc that the image was in the old 4:3 “full-screen” aspect ratio, though since Shrek was a computer-animated film that wasn’t as much an issue as it would be for a live-action movie. In fact, I suspect the filmmakers, directors Andrew Adamson and Vicki Jenson, deliberately framed the movie so it would work in both 1.33:1 and 1.55:1 ratios. Like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Shrek (which we obtained, along with the sequel Shrek 2, in a batch of old DVD’s one of Charles’s co-workers was giving away because she’s given up on playback software and now “streams” everything – yuck!) isn’t a great movie but it is an extremely entertaining one. Basically, Shrek is a mash-up of fairy tales somewhat along the lines of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods, though without the overlay of seriousness Sondheim and his book writer, James Lapine, brought to their version. The title character, Shrek (Mike Myers), is a hideous green ogre whose very appearance is supposed to scare the hell out of ordinary humans, but he predictably turns out to be a gentle giant. He lives in the kingdom of Dulac (as in “Sir Lancelot du Lac” – the parking lot in front of the big castle where the ruler lives is even inevitably called “Lancelot”), whose ruler, Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow), is upset because he’s still called a “Lord” instead of a full-fledged king. The only way he can get to be a king is if he marries a princess, and there’s a nice sequence satirizing the “Bachelorette” dating shows in which he’s offered three possibilities: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz).

Alas, Princess Fiona is being held hostage in a castle guarded by a fire-breathing dragon (Gary A. Hecker), and only a knight pure and brave of heart can rescue her and give her the first kiss that will remove the spell from her and bring her life and love. Lord Farquaad hires Shrek to go on the quest and bring Princess Fiona back to him so he can marry her, and in return Farquaad will give back Shrek his swamp, where he’s dumped all the fairy-tale characters he’s exiled from his domain – including Pinocchio (Cody Cameron), his creator Geppetto (Chris Miller), Peter Pan (Michael Gelasso), two of the Three Blind Mice (Christopher Knights, who’s also listed as voicing a character called “Thelonious,” and Simon J. Smith) and various other classic personae. Along the way Shrek also acquires a companion, a wise-cracking donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy (in one of his more tolerable performances, largely because we don’t have to look at him; he was great as the old soul singer in Dreamgirls but ordinarily he’s one of the most repulsive screen presences in movie history), and the two of them rescue the princess from the dragon quite easily. Part of that is explained by the writing committee (written by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman and Roger H. Schulman from a kids’ book by William Steig, with additional dialogue by Cody Cameron, Chris Miller and Conrad Vernon), who make the dragon female and have her get a crush on the donkey. The princess is rescued from the dragon at the film’s midway point, and the rest of the movie is taken up by Shrek’s and the donkey’s efforts to get her back to Dulac and into the arms of Lord Farquaar. There are a lot of jokes about Lord Farquaar’s short stature, and at first I thought they were rather dubious off-color lines suggesting that Farquaar wasn’t especially well hung, but when Our Heroes finally get back to the castle it turns out that Lord Farquaar is really short (though I couldn’t help but think of another fantasy, Game of Thrones, in which Peter Dinklage’s character did pretty well for himself despite his little-person status).

In the meantime, Shrek has fallen for Princess Fiona himself, and the writers have a trick up their sleeves [spoiler alert!]: at sundown Fiona goes through a werewolf-style physical transformation from a nice-looking human woman into an ogre like Shrek, thanks to a spell a witch put on her in her girlhood. During their trek back to Dulac, the good guys also encounter Robin Hood (Vincent Cassel) and his band of Merry Men, and the meeting is staged almost exactly like the “Welcome to Sherwood, my lady!” scene from the 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood movie with Errol Flynn. The Merry Men do a song-and-dance routine that came a bit too close to Mel Brooks’s spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights for me, then they disappear. By the time the wedding of Farquaar and Fiona is supposed to occur, Shrek decides to do a Graduate-style crash of the big ceremony while Fiona is rushing through it hoping it can be completed before she changes back into an ogre – only, thanks to the amorous dragon who conveniently eats Lord Farquaar just as the ceremony is completed (making Fiona an instant widow), Shrek is able to marry her himself and it turns out that an ogre is Fiona’s normal form; it’s the beautiful princess that was the result of the witch’s spell. Shrek is also full of clips from famous popular songs, some of them used quite effectively (notably the appearance of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation”), others not so well (and it doesn’t help that the version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is a surprisingly limp one by John Cale, an artist I ordinarily like; my reference versions are Cohen’s own, Jeff Buckley’s star-making hit cover and the stunning one k. d. lang sang at the end of the opening ceremony at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver). But in addition to the songs in the film itself there’s a quite charming post-credits karaoke sequence featuring songs like Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Anthony Ray’s “Baby Get Back,” Morris Albert’s and Louis Gaste’s awful “Feelings,” the Village People’s “Y-M-C-A,” Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?,” the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” Anselm Douglas’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?,” Sly and the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music” and The Turtles’ “Happy Together.” All told, Shrek is a quite charming movie (that word keeps coming to mind about it) and an easy hour-and-a-half on the minds and ears of its viewers.