Shrek the Third (DreamWorks Animation, Pacific Data Images, Paramount, 2007)

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

Last night (Monday, February 19) my husband Charles and I watched Shrek the Third, third film in the four-movie Shrek cycle loosed upon the world by DreamWorks Animation starting with the original Shrek from 2001. The films were made at three-year intervals – Shrek 2 in 2004, Shrek the Third in 2007 and the final one (so far), Shrek Forever After, in 2010. Shrek the Third had a different creative team from the first two; the director was Chris Miller, with Raman Hui officially listed as “co-director” (which suggests, to paraphrase George Orwell in Animal Farm, that Miller and Hui were equal but Miller was “more equal” than Hui). The writers were William Steig (whose 1990 children’s book Shrek! – notice the exclamation point – provided the basis for the whole cycle); Andrew Adamson, who co-wrote and co-directed the first two Shreks, credited with the original story; Jeffrey Price, Chris Miller, Peter S. Seaman and Aron Warner with the screenplay; and Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Roger S. H. Schulman and Joe Stillman getting the credit they also got on Shrek 2 for adding “additional characters” to the Shrek universe. Shrek the Third didn’t have quite the élan of the first two films in the series – which had pleasantly surprised both Charles and I in their relative sophistication and in particular for the way they mashed up old fairy tales in new and quite innovative ways (when we watched the first Shrek I had compared it to Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods as a fairy-tale mash-up, and though Into the Woods is a considerably darker and more ominous story than Shrek, they’re close enough to withstand the comparison). This time around, the director(s) and writers went far more for slapstick than for creativity – in one early scene they even repeated Buster Keaton’s (and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s before him!) old gag of having the wall of a building fall on their main character, who escapes harm only because he’s under an open window when the wall falls.

The marvelous panoply of reworked characters from old fairy stories that did so much to make the first two Shrek films entertaining is here reduced to a sort of Greek chorus of princesses: Sleeping Beauty (Cheri Oteri), Snow White (Amy Poehler), Cinderella (Amy Sedaris) and Rapunzel (Maya Rudolph). They sit by and comment on the action, and Rapunzel goes over to the Dark Side of the Force and hooks up with the piece’s principal villain, Prince Charming (Rupert Everett). In Shrek 2 Prince Charming was the chronically weak son of the Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders); this time around he’s an out-and-out bad guy out to usurp the throne of Far, Far Away (the legendary locale) now that King Harold (John Cleese) has croaked his last – pun definitely intended, since at the end of Shrek 2 Harold reverted to his origins as a frog and it’s as a frog that he dies here. On his deathbed (or deathpad) Harold wills the kingdom to the ogre Shrek (Mike Myers) and his wife, Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), but Shrek protests that he’s not cut out to be a ruler of anything and he just wants to get back to his swamp so he and Fiona can live out their lives as happy little ogres and have ogre kids. Shrek’s utter incompetence at the king gig is shown when he’s assigned to christen a ship, only he forgets to break the ceremonial bottle against it and throws it at the departing ship instead – on which it has the effect of a Molotov cocktail, blasting a hole in the stern and setting the whole ship on fire. Before he croaks his last, Harold tells Shrek that there’s only one other heir, Artie (Justin Timberlake, of all people), true name Arthur Pendragon (yes, that King Arthur!), and Shrek and his sidekicks Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) set out for Worcestershire to fetch Artie and bring him back to Far, Far Away so he can rule as the next king.

Worcestershire (and of course the writers couldn’t resist the gag of having someone – Eddie Murphy’s character – butcher the pronunciation of the name!) turns out to be a super-status-conscious high school that seems to be imported from a John Hughes movie, and Artie is the runt of the litter, the put-upon and much-bullied kid who’s written off by his classmates as a hopeless nerd. (He even name-checks “Guin” – short for “Guinevere” – as the girl he has a doomed crush on, and I was amused at the in-joke because Julie Andrews, who’s in this movie as the voice of Queen Lillian, Harold’s wife, played Guinevere in the original Broadway production of the Alan Jay Lerner/Frederick Loewe musical Camelot.) One would think a boy like that would jump at the chance of leaving that environment and going to a fairy-tale land where he could be king, but Artie keeps trying to get away and Our Heroes keep having to track him down. Meanwhile, back in Far, Far Away Prince Charming has recruited an all-star cast of fairy-tale villains – the Evil Queen (Susanne Blakeslee), the Blind Mice (Christopher Knights), the walking, talking trees from The Wizard of Oz (Andrew Birch and Christopher Knights again), Rumplestiltskin (Conrad Vernon, who co-directed Shrek 2) and Captain Hook (Ian MacShane) – to aid him in his evil quest to keep both Shrek and Artie off the throne so he can claim it for himself and make Rapunzel his queen. (There’s a great scene in which the good guys pull on Rapunzel’s famous golden hair – and it comes off and reveals her as bald underneath.) They managed to clap Shrek and company into a dungeon before the good guys somehow break free. Artie is installed as king and Shrek and Fiona return to their swamp, where Fiona gives birth to a litter of ogre triplets.

While I was a bit disappointed in Shrek the Third – maybe it was the change in creative personnel behind the cameras, or maybe the concept was just getting a bit threadbare this time around – it was at least a fun movie and acceptable entertainment, though one thing I sorely missed was a post-credits musical medley as appeared in the home-video versions (though not the theatrical releases!) of the first two films. Charles and I were also amused that the DVD we were watching began with trailers for two other DreamWorks animation films, Megamind (2010) – a spoof of Superman which posits that two families on planets about to self-destruct sent their newborn babies to Earth, one who became the superhero Metro Man (alas, they couldn’t call him Superman!) and one who became the super-villain Megamind – and Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011), narrated on screen by Jack Black, who voiced the title character. The reason we found the trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2 particularly noteworthy was we’d just seen TV spots advertising the latest in the series, Kung Fu Panda 4!