Shrek?


Sacrilege, I know. It's not Disney, it's not hand-drawn, and it's not old. But you didn't make any of those things explicit, and it is my favourite animated movie. And I'm going to spend an entire post explaining why.

First of all, I need to get some bias out of the way. Shrek came out in 2001, when I was 8. This means that not only have I watched it countless times (to the point where I can quote pretty much the entire movie line for line) but that it came fairly early on in my movie-watching life and thus has a fair whack of nostalgia associated with it.

Nostalgia aside though, I actually think that Shrek is a good movie, and a lot of that stems from the characters. Individually, all three main characters have actual real character development: Shrek goes from cynic to believer, Donkey goes from sidekick to hero, and Fiona goes from tryhard princess to an actual and literal ogre. But, y'know. Ogre in a good way.

So the arcs of each character are what gives the movie its depth, its actual emotions. That's what makes Shrek and Donkey's journey feel like an epic quest in comparison to the journey in Shrek 2, which feels a lot more mundane despite being to a place actually named Far Far Away. What makes the movie tick minute to minute, though, is the way they bounce off each other. In Shrek and Donkey, for example, you have the typical Lethal Weapon-esque buddy cop action movie vibe, where the two guys who hate each other come to depend on each other, seemingly by way of wisecracks alone, and Shrek and Fiona could be lifted right out of a romantic comedy. They're fairly stock standard relationships, sure, but the reason we keep seeing them over and over is because they're fun, and they work.

What makes all this work is the humour, of which Shrek is kind of a smorgasbord. There's slapstick. There's puns. There's absurdity. There's parody. There are musical numbers (usually accompanied by dumbfounded genre-savvy disbelief from the protagonists). There's thinly veiled sexual innuendo. It has all the things, and they all work, and the movie still works as an epic fantasy romance at the end of it all, which seems like it would be very difficult to pull off.

Then there's the music. Yes, having Smash Mouth in there dates it a bit, but it's also one of the reasons the movie works so well. It gives you something to sing along to (which, as established by every Disney movie ever, is an absolute necessity) while still being a little bit cool. Which is the core of the movie, really. Sure, it's a sarcastic and cynical deconstruction of fairytales, but at its core, it honestly does have a happily ever after. Even if it is in a swamp.

Writing this has actually made me realise two things. The first is that I really really want to go and watch Shrek right now. The second is that given the chance, I'd also really like to sit down and properly pick this movie apart and write it up, because I really think it's well made enough to withstand that kind of treatment and still be fun to watch.