Reaction Shots: Shrek is Evil
Plus the Movie of the Week and a thread of Terrible Takes.
Is Shrek still a Good Film?
“Shrek is love. Shrek was life,” was a meme relating to a 4chan fanfic of one’s love for the 2001 film about the green-skinned ogre of the same name (if you want to Google it, be my guest, but safe to say it ain’t PC here). Looking back at it 20 years later, it’s a product that defied the question of whether it aged well, but also with the conventions of parody. That’s barely scratching the surface, given the relentless mockery of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories.
Consider that the first one was designed to be the middle finger to earnest traditional storytelling aimed at children. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the founder of Dreamworks and its Animation studio, leveraged this movie as an ambitious move, years after his unceremonious firing at Disney. In it, Robin Hood is a French pervert. It doubled down on his thin tolerance for Hollywood phoniness with Shrek 2, where the Prince Charming and Fairy Godmother are lawful evil, while Tinkerbell has to sniff the flatulence of two ogres. That was the frosting of a winning cake, and it spawned more sequels where we follow the ogre trying to become a responsible person, as the franchise grows over to become the kind of thing it was spoofing.
In Shrek, the ogre takes an attitude of ‘solitude is bliss’, as he lays in his swamp, gleefully scaring pitchfork-wielding mobs until a bunch of public domain fairytale characters intrudes because Lord Farquaad (get it?) wants them banished. The film’s morale is that Shrek is a lonely misfit, and he doesn’t realize it until he meets Princess Fiona. It is pretty contradictory considering the number of put-down jokes, mainly targeted at Farquaad’s limitations like his penis size and dwarf height. This off-kilter balance proved to be a turn-off for its detractors. One such critic is Scott Tobias, who notes in his retrospective that “there’s an excess of anachronisms and buddy-movie riffs from Myers and Murphy that have little relation to the backdrop and a woe-is-me soppiness to the love story between two lonely, misunderstood freaks.”
Shrek is influential for right and wrong reasons. At its worst, the franchise shaped the Dreamworks Animation template; since then, there’s a movie featuring a star-studded cast voicing a bunch of animals, while ensuring there’s a tint of adult-laced humor saturated with pop culture references to innuendo, with CGI animation cheap enough to make a profit. (the nadir of this is the many close-ups of Shark Tale, one of which contains Angelina Jolie as a femme fatale fish)
But its hero’s self-depreciation makes for the better part of its impact, remaining ripe for internet content. Like its opening song All Star, Shrek inspired countless memes, whether it’s a video of the film sped up every time he takes a step, amateur recreations of the awkward dinner in Shrek 2, or just perverted fanfic of the hero. Whether or not you find those memes funny, they take a weird-looking character you enjoyed from your childhood and push it to absurdist extremes.
I’m not sure that I like Shrek that much now, compared to when I watched it as a kid. I first watched it during a school excursion, and back then, it was refreshing to hear “I huff and he puffed” turned to a punchline. I’m pretty sure that the teachers who brought us to the theatre had felt some sense of entertainment. But the sequel (and I’m specifically referring to Shrek 2) has more wit, once it focused on the dynamic between Shrek and Fiona. The dinner is recreated several times and for good reason: the dialogue is natural, and it is relatable to anyone bringing a non-threatening partner into the family.
Is it a force of evil? Sure, but I guess it’s fine.
Speaking of which.