It’s not often you get animated movies with as much appeal for adults as they have for children. It must be a difficult tightrope to walk, especially given Hollywood’s extremely restricted, even distorted, sense of what children want or need.
DreamWorks’ new animated feature, Shrek, is a somewhat twisted fairy tale that manages to achieve that balance – though it’s hard, as an adult who enjoyed the movie, to see if there is enough in it for the kids.
Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) is a plump green ogre who lives in a swamp, quite content as long as he’s left alone. He has his nasty habits (mostly to do with farts and earwax), but he’s fairly good-natured on the whole, within the parameters of ogre emotion.
He is, however, capable of turning on the scariness if he’s disturbed – by crusading villagers, for instance.
He faces a much larger problem, however, when the wicked Lord Farquaad (voiced by John Lithgow) starts rounding up all the magical creatures in his mediaeval domain. Much to his disgust, Shrek finds the three blind mice, the big bad wolf, the three little pigs and a host of other cartoon refugees squatting in his swamp. By now he has also made the acquaintance of a short-legged, fast-talking donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy), on the run from Lord Farquaad’s minions, who seems incapable of taking no for an answer.
So Shrek, with Donkey by his side, heads off to Lord Farquaad’s castle to cut a deal. Lord Farquaad sends him off on a quest to rescue a princess (Cameron Diaz) imprisoned by a dragon, a princess he has decided to marry, in exchange for clearing the swamp of intruders.
Thus Shrek and Donkey embark on a journey worthy of the knights errant of old, involving all sorts of derring-do and, eventually, romance. It makes a delightful movie, with a heart-warming message about the limits of beauty. The animation is more-or-less in Toy Story style, with some Dinosaur detail (in, for instance, Donkey’s hair). It doesn’t look very startling, though: its originality lies in a witty script with situations that are often very funny.
Besides their general parody of fairy-tale conventions, the film-makers send up their animation rival Disney in the portrayal of Lord Farquaad’s highly ordered and rather fake demesne, which is very much like Disney World, as well as having an amusing poke at musicals and martial arts movies. The odd bum note is struck (as in the use of Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah in onesequence), but otherwise Shrek gets it right. Grown-ups, certainly, will laugh – but I fear the kids might be left a little mystified at times.