SHREK (2001) Four stars

I recently watched SHREK for the who knows how many times and it was every bit as fun as it was the first time all those years ago.

Watching it was just like catching up with an old friend who you have not seen in a long time. Sometimes, that’s a delightful experience as two people do not miss a beat despite the passing of time. Once in a while, it’s just two people in a room who have nothing to say to each other one way or the other. I connected with SHREK all over again.

There’s so many great characters, old friends if you will, in SHREK and I think that, more than anything else, is the secret to its success.

We might as well as start with the title character. The name Shrek itself calls to mind the surname Schreck, the German actor who played Dracula in the F.W. Murnau silent classic NOSFERATU (1922). Schreck means “a feeling of fear or alarm.” Ogre means a man-eating giant in folklore and a cruel or terrifying person in reality. None of those definitions fit the title character in SHREK, who thankfully is more of an ogre with a heart of gold than a man-eating giant. Granted, Shrek would just rather be left alone in his swamp, at least at the beginning of the picture. His privacy’s besieged upon first by a single annoyance and then by a slew of fairy tale characters who have been driven from their kingdom. Eventually, he takes on the assignment of slaying a dragon and rescuing a princess from an outsourcing overlord.

Princess Fiona is not the average princess and, for that matter, Dragon is not the average dragon. Of course, this is not a Disney picture, it’s a DreamWorks extravaganza, and the scene where Fiona unleashes her inner martial artist on Monsieur Robin Hood and his Merry Men proved to be a game changer for animated princesses. I could have lived without the MATRIX reference, since it seemed like every other picture made in the early 2000s referenced THE MATRIX, but it was a pleasant surprise to see her kick ass. She has even more surprises in store, especially for Shrek.

Surprises are SHREK in a nutshell, which puts entertaining and fresh spins and variations on durable storytelling traditions or that’s just another way of saying that SHREK breathed fresh life into fairy tale stories. It will remind viewers of THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

In other words, at times, SHREK absolutely skewers fairy tales. I mean, there’s the delightful scene where antagonist Lord Farquaad tortures the Gingerbread Man for information about the whereabouts of all his fellow fairy tale brothers and sisters. What will it take to make him crack? Lord Farquaad makes a move toward the Gingerbread Man’s gumdrop buttons and that’s going way, way, way too far. That’s a fun scene, and there’s probably about 50 more fun scenes in SHREK.

Children and adults both enjoy SHREK, and that’s because there’s jokes only more experienced viewers will understand. For example, when Shrek observes that Lord Farquaad must be overcompensating for something, we adults know what’s that something. SHREK is a film truly for the entire family, capable of placating the smart ass teenager, the lover of fairy tales and/or musicals, and the grumpy old man to name three demographics.

We have mentioned Lord Farquaad a couple times already in this review, and he makes for a great villain. He’s voiced by John Lithgow, who brings his expertise from live-action villainous roles in BLOW OUT, RAISING CAIN, and CLIFFHANGER. He’s one of those actors who we love to hate. This is also the same Lithgow, by the way, who released “John Lithgow’s Kid-Size Concert” on VHS in 1990, advertised on the box as “Award winning actor JOHN LITHGOW sings and strums his favorite songs for kids.”

If there’s a hero (and a leading lady and a villain), invariably there must be a loyal sidekick for the hero and that’s filled in SHREK by Donkey, voiced by Eddie Murphy. Donkey, of course, exists in sharp contrast to Shrek, meaning that he’s a motormouth who eventually wears down the resistance of the big ogre. Donkey even finds himself a very unlikely love interest.

Until now, I have skipped Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz, who voice Shrek and Princess Fiona. They were not the original choices. Nicolas Cage passed on the title character at one point and Chris Farley recorded nearly all of his lines as Shrek, but Farley died of a drug overdose before he could finish. SHREK paired Farley with Janeane Garofalo as Princess Fiona, but she was fired without an explanation after his death. Shrek and Fiona each received a rewrite and personality changes after the personnel changes to Myers and Diaz, and Myers finally decided upon his trademark Scottish accent for one of his three iconic characters (Wayne and Austin Powers the other two) … hard to imagine Shrek without one at this point. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Myers, Diaz, Murphy, and Lithgow not voicing their respective characters.

SHREK spawned a new wave of computer animated pictures built upon pop-culture references and just being too darn clever for their own darn good, including its own increasingly lackluster sequels (I stopped at SHREK THE TURD, er, SHREK THE THIRD). Apparently, there’s a reboot or sequel named SHREK 5 slated for 2022.