A couple of months in the past, I used to be scrolling by means of TikTok once I noticed a video of Shrek on a large display screen at a rave, fortunately gamboling by means of his swamp to a remixed model of “Growth Growth Growth Growth.” Then the beat drops, and he begins stomping and projectile vomiting everywhere in the viewers, lasers capturing out of his eyes. It’s actually a terrifying sight, significantly should you’re on molly, as most of the attendees probably are. However judging by their response within the video, they will’t get sufficient of it.
Rolling millennials’ gleeful reception towards the seven-foot-tall ogre is nothing lower than a testomony to the indefatigability of the Shrek franchise itself. The sequence, a couple of lovable ogre (Mike Myers) who’s compelled to save lots of a princess (Cameron Diaz) from a locked tower, has spawned two spinoffs, three sequels, a musical adaptation, a Common Studios trip, a bootleg web reboot, and numerous sexy memes. The primary sequel, Shrek 2, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary on April 12, was for a while the highest-grossing animated film in historical past; the franchise is, thus far, the second highest-grossing of all time, simply behind Despicable Me. Shrek fan artwork and shitposts additionally characterize a large cornerstone of web tradition, with members of the fandom coming to be referred to as “brogres.”
All of this has occurred regardless of it being pretty universally acknowledged that the Shrek franchise is sort of shitty. It has come to be considered as a harbinger of big-budget, computer-generated sludge aimed toward children, prompting a pattern of “pil[ing] celebrities into recording cubicles, feed[ing] them committee-polished one-liners and put[ting] these strains within the mouths of sassy CGI animals,” in accordance with a 2021 retrospective by Guardian columnist Scott Tobias. As my colleague Miles Klee wrote in a 2018 piece on Shrek memes, “the additional we acquired from the period of Shrek’s box-office dominance, the stupider it appeared — a hodgepodge of limp references and dated visible results,” with irony-poisoned followers embracing it much less “a story than a market merchandise, or extra precisely, a model.”
I adored Shrek once I first noticed it at my aunt’s home one Thanksgiving, cracking up with my cousins on the particular karaoke function of the Gingerbread Man singing “Do You Actually Wish to Damage Me” and Donkey rapping to “Child Received Again.” My buddy Sam Schreck, in a transfer apparently supposed to preempt schoolyard bullying over his final identify, additionally cherished it, throwing a Shrek-themed eleventh birthday celebration by taking a gaggle of associates to see it in theaters earlier than going to the now-defunct restaurant chain Cosi and utilizing the payphone to name Z100. It’s straightforward to see why children, significantly older ones, cherished it a lot. When it got here out. I used to be about 10, and I didn’t discover any of the popular culture references gimmicky or pandering. Quite the opposite, it felt just like the filmmakers revered my cultural intelligence sufficient to get the joke, no matter whether or not it was significantly humorous.
That view, nevertheless, has modified since I hit maturity and have become a guardian myself. Although watching the films you used to like by means of the lens of your offspring can usually be a joyous communal expertise, I by no means get that sense when my seven-year-old places on Shrek or Shrek 2 or Shrek the Third (he doesn’t know Ceaselessly After exists, which, on the cusp of this Passover vacation, brings to thoughts the phrase dayenu: Had DreamWorks put out one Shrek and give up whereas it was forward, it will have been sufficient for us). Every actuality TV present reference and recognizable Seventies yacht rock hit and adorably rendered CGI sidekick was like a dagger to the guts, a portent of the tasteless, amorphous animated movie panorama that was to come back.
This legacy is especially ironic provided that, on the time that it got here out, the Shrek franchise was certainly extensively considered subversive. It represented the whole inverse of the Disney model, which on the time dominated kiddie leisure: snarky the place Disney was candy, crude the place Disney was refined, pop culturally savvy the place Disney was timeless. Shrek was one of many earliest tasks from DreamWorks, the corporate former Disney president Jeffrey Katzenberg had began after being handed over for a promotion in 1994. Previous to beginning DreamWorks, the über-ambitious Katzenberg had overseen the supervision of the so-called Renaissance of Disney’s animated movies, together with The Little Mermaid and Magnificence and the Beast. With its myriad references to warbling princesses, cloying theme park animatronics, and lovable speaking animals, Shrek was considered by critics as a large inexperienced center finger to Katzenberg’s former employer.
The sequel, Shrek 2, went even heavier on the Disney digs, that includes anthropomorphized cartoon furnishings a la Magnificence and the Beast and a sequence through which Fiona spots a Little Mermaid doppelgänger getting too cozy with Shrek and tosses her again into the ocean. Such gags, although pretty par for the course in up to date animation (even inside the Disney firm, which has began leaning into skewering its personal model, peaking with a princess-centric gag in Ralph Breaks the Web), have been successful with followers and critics on the time. New York Occasions movie critic Elvis Mitchell wrote that whereas “beating up on the irritatingly dainty Disney emblems is nothing new; [it] has not often been finished with the demolition-derby zest of Shrek.”
Within the years since, nevertheless, the Shrek franchise has been criticized for uplifting a wave of equally pop-culture-reference-heavy, celebrity-driven animated movies that dominated the children’ leisure panorama within the 2010s, such because the Trolls and Kung Fu Panda (from DreamWorks) and Despicable Me and Sing franchises (from Illumination). Whereas not all of those movies are unhealthy per se, all of them just about uniformly lean into the guiding proposition on the heart of the primary Shrek film: Grown-ups, we all know you don’t wish to be right here, so allow us to make it value your whereas by tossing you a wisecracking Eddie Murphy and some Courting Recreation references.
Nonetheless, there’s actual coronary heart beneath the good inexperienced stomach of Shrek — you simply need to know the place to look. Shrek is, basically, a contented outsider, somebody who offers little thought to up to date social mores and the way he presents himself to the remainder of the world — and likes it that manner (on this sense, he’s a little bit like a kiddie Larry David). As he famously explains, “ogres are like onions,” in that they each have layers; when Donkey means that Shrek alter the simile to make it extra interesting by invoking truffles or parfaits, Shrek snarls, “I don’t care what everybody likes. Ogres usually are not like truffles.”
So many youngsters’s motion pictures are centered round distinctive, bold characters: probably the most lovely princess, the quickest automobile, the pluckiest bunny, the evillest supervillain, probably the most loyal toy. In presenting the world by means of the lens of extremes, these motion pictures usually fail to acknowledge that for most of the children watching, most won’t be the very best at every part, and even fairly good at one explicit factor. Not everybody could be worshiped; many individuals discover it troublesome to even be preferred. To see a protagonist who’s not solely outlined by his unlikeability and unremarkable nature, in addition to his complete lack of curiosity in attempting to make himself palatable to mainstream society — and to see that character carve out a contented and functioning household and social world for himself — is sort of superior.
This theme can be current within the 2004 sequel — arguably, by means of an excellent darker lens than the unique. In Shrek 2, Shrek should contend along with his disapproving in-laws, King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews), who’re displeased along with his daughter Fiona’s alternative of suitor. So the King hires a hitman (the lovely Puss in Boots, voiced by Antonio Banderas) to homicide him, so their daughter, who was positioned underneath a spell at delivery that turns her into an ogre at midnight, can break the spell and develop into a fantastic human. Devastated and angered by the dearth of acceptance from his in-laws, Shrek drinks a potion to show him and Fiona into attractive people, which he thinks is what she in the end needs based mostly on a peek at her teenage diary.
There’s a model of Shrek 2 through which that plot level would have sufficed as a contented ending in itself, and certainly, once I was a child watching on DVD, I at all times questioned why that wasn’t the case: Why couldn’t Shrek and Fiona beat the unhealthy guys and keep scorching, collectively? Why would they decide to make their lives harder by actively selecting to be ugly? (I used to be 14, and clearly wildly shallow.) However after all, that’s not how the film ends. By a sequence of machinations, the potion drives Shrek and Fiona additional aside, and when they’re reunited, they select to remain collectively as their ogre selves.
As an grownup, I perceive, for each industrial and screenwriting causes, why Shrek 2 couldn’t have ended with Shrek trying like a cartoon model of Henry Cavill. Nonetheless, I believe emphasizing the significance of relinquishing your expectations for what you assume your life ought to appear like, and discovering somebody who loves you not despite your most ogreish qualities, however due to them, is a surprisingly subtle message for youths (and, let’s be trustworthy, for many adults as properly).
Because the franchise progressed, Shrek began to lose a few of its heat and gooey ethical heart, giving solution to one thing tougher and extra cynical. Shrek the Third options the introduction of a forgettable prince character (voiced by Justin Timberlake), eschewing the give attention to Shrek and Fiona’s relationship for a hackneyed physique swap subplot; Shrek Ceaselessly After facilities round Shrek’s malaise over turning into a domesticated household man with a scorching nagging spouse, basically the animated model of The King of Queens. The pop-cultural references grew to become extra frequent, the casting decisions extra overtly celebrity-driven (Ryan Seacrest has a cameo within the fourth one, for some purpose). Following the discharge of the final movie, it briefly skilled second life as a Broadway musical, then third life as an ironic web meme. And that is sort of the place it stands to this present day: When it’s not being lauded by millennials purporting to be sexy for Shrek, or being referenced in visuals from raves, it’s being excoriated by severe connoisseurs of youngsters’ leisure. The argument is normally that Shrek poisoned the properly, birthing a slew of equally flat-looking, cynically written big-budget animated movies. “Shrek at 20: an unfunny and overrated low for blockbuster animation,” reads the headline to that Guardian column.
It’s unfair to position the loss of life of blockbuster animation squarely on Shrek’s shoulders, partially as a result of it’s inaccurate to say that it’s useless within the first place. The Tremendous Mario Bros. film was a greater than $1.36 billion worldwide hit in 2023, as was Spider-Man: Throughout the Spider-Verse, and although Disney and Pixar’s 2023 efforts (Elemental and Want) have been disappointing, Frozen and Frozen II are to this present day among the many prime 5 highest grossing animated movies of all time. Children’ motion pictures nonetheless earn money, and they’ll proceed to take action for so long as there are mother and father searching for a solution to kill two hours on a wet Saturday.
However with YouTube more and more dominating the children’ leisure area — to the diploma that MrBeast makes an look within the newest incarnation of Kung Fu Panda — and animated motion pictures containing topical references to reveals like The Bachelor a dime a dozen, it’s arduous to think about a world through which the Shrek franchise may have been as huge of a hit had it come out at present. Very similar to Sam Schreck’s Cosi Z100 birthday celebration, it is rather a lot a product of its time. Its worst qualities are very unhealthy, and its finest qualities not often appreciated. On the very least, it marks the ultimate nail within the coffin for the movie’s trade use of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” However on the similar time, in a panorama dominated by reboots and IP and algorithms figuring out what they assume children will like, perhaps there’s a lesson to be derived from the truth that a farting, mossy-toothed, seven-foot-tall ogre was at one level the winner of the day, or that there’s one thing to be gained from not caring about being preferred. Perhaps Hollywood can study from being an onion in a world of truffles.
