Shot Through The Heart

SHREK (2001)

The great thing about having an animator roommate is that you have an excuse to go see all the non-Disney animation movies, even the ones that you know are going to be lousy, because you're going at the behest of your animator roomie, no fool she, who knows that the bigger the opening weekends of non-Disney animation movies, the more competition there'll be to the NDM and, in theory, the better the product, and also the better the chances of her getting an animation gig.

The first half of Shrek introduces the characters. The second half really opens them up... And so it was that I found myself, on opening weekend, at Shrek, Dreamworks SKG's latest animated film, even though I knew beyond a reasonable doubt was going to suck. It was being hailed as a breakthrough in computer animation, but everything I saw looked blucky and over-textured. It was a comedy, but nothing in the commercials or trailers made me laugh. The voices were done by Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz: Myers has been on the thin line between annoying and insufferable for about a year now, Eddie Murphy has seemed like a chemically castrated version of himself for about ten years now, and the least interesting thing about Cameron Diaz is her voice. And then there's the "we're making fun of Disneyland" subtext that I had heard about, which didn't really ring my chimes. The 'K' in 'SKG' after all is Katzenberg, who helped return Disney to its throne in the '80s and '90s, and who bears a vengeful grudge because he only got $375 million when he left when he expected $748 million. There was just no way Shrek was going to be anything other than--and I'll say it--dreck.

And if you think so, too: good. Go see the movie right now.

Shrek is, I am embarrassed to admit, great. And it's great in ways that I find difficult to explain. First, it's structured into three very different acts, each of which is surprising and clever. In the first, all the fairy tale creatures are being caught and rounded up by Lord Farquaad's men, which leads a talking donkey to take refuge in the last safe place--the swamp that is home to the feared ogre, Shrek. Shrek's attempt to get some peace and quiet from the donkey and all the rest of the fairy tale refugees leads him (and the donkey) to Farquaad's kingdom. But he then becomes embroiled in a quest to rescue Princess Fiona, finding himself on the wrong side of the fairy tale tracks--as a hero. And that's just the first act and a half, stripped of all embellishment. The rest of the movie then spends its time playing not as much with the premise as with the characters who we've gotten to know and like. The first half is all clever spins on fairy tale creatures, playful anachronisms, likable characters and funny pokes at Disney (I think some of the laughs had at Lord Farquaad's expense are very nasty jabs and specific jabs at Michael Eisner), while the second half retains the wit but goes a little deeper with the characters and their relationships.

Part of what makes this all work is that Shrek, the character, is in the grand tradition of capable outsiders, comfortable being outside society, who find themselves pressed reluctantly into the service of good---Mad Max, Han Solo, Bogart in Casablanca. It's a credit to the writers and to Mike Myers, playing Shrek as a Scotsman who's good-natured enough as long as you leave him alone, that you root for Shrek's amiable misanthropy in the beginning and come to feel for him in the end. Also startling is how good Eddie Murphy is as the talking donkey (who, of course, won't shut up). To use the parlance of fairy tales, it was like seeing a curse lifted as Murphy sounding so exuberant and weightless.

This in no way does the actual movie justice... As for the animation--I ended up liking it more and more as the movie went along. It breaks out every texture the animators had in their toolbox palette, but what I liked was the surprising retroness of it; the roundedness of the character design, the willingness to push cartooniness into caricaturish ugliness (I thought it was particularly apt how horse-faced and homely the donkey looked at certain angles) and the eye for depth and perspective. At times, Shrek feels like the most expensive Rankin-Bass special ever made--it's kind of like watching Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer on shrooms--and at other times like the lost world of those old Viewmaster puppet reels. It was a treat.

The whole movie was a treat, right down to its modern rock soundtrack (I had an odd Natural Born Killers flashback when they played Bob Dylan's "You Belong To Me" but other than that, it was great) and is very much worth seeing. And the less you expect of it, the more you'll enjoy it (which made this review kinda troublesome to write). I must admit I feel sad that the engine of Shrek--the happiness that can come from being who you are and not trying to fit in---will be used to sell happy meals and toys and enrich the coffers of three guys (S, K and G) who crave the public's love and money in ways far more rapacious than even the villainous Lord Farquaad. But I can't begrudge a good movie, which Shrek really, believe it or not, actually is.

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