Shrek

Call it what you will, an “animated feature” or a cartoon, “Shrek” is pretty darn funny. I don’t go to see animated features often. For one thing, many are geared towards an audience at the entry end of the educational process. For another, it is a little hard to know how to review them. If you believe that directing is as much about guiding actors as it is about pointing the camera in the right direction, and that acting is as much about facial expression and body language as it is about voices, then cartoons leave you high and dry in those two rather important cinematic areas. (For this reason I have dispensed with the usual “Vital Signs” for “Shrek” and just given it a Prognosis.) There are, however, significant similarities between animations and real movies, the most crucial of which is the absolutely central role of good writing. No good movie was ever made from a lousy script (though many a good script has been ruined in the course of shooting it), and just because a movie is a cartoon does not exempt it from this fundamental law of nature. To be sure, the scripts for animations seem to be getting smarter, just as the scripts for regular movies seem, by and large, to be getting dumber.

Writers are getting ever closer to the Holy Grail of a movie that amuses children while not boring adults into coma. That is a difficult trick, but riches await those who pull it off. The script for “Shrek,” by the guys listed at right, seems quite up to the task. If anything, I suspect that many of the gags would sail over the head of all but the most astute preschoolers. The plot (based upon a book by William Steig) centers around the title character (voiced in a sort of Scottish accent by Mike Meyers), an enormous ogre who lives in a swamp and just wants to be left alone. He suffers from a tremendous self esteem problem, apparently because of insecurity about his looks. After a bit of plot canoodling, he is charged by the tiny and malevolent Lord Farquaad (Lithgow) with retrieving the lovely Princess Fiona (Diaz) from her dragon guarded castle to be Farquaad’s bride. Shrek makes the journey, assisted by his donkey sidekick (called “Donkey,” and voiced by Eddie Murphy). Donkey, of course, has all the best lines, as sidekicks so often do, and it’s a good thing, because Donkey is pretty much incapable of shutting up.

The best parts of “Shrek” are the goofy sendups of fairy tale clichés. (These are far more entertaining than the rather shopworn “love yourself” themes that the movie espouses.) The tone is set from the start, when a traditional book of fairy tales turns out to be no more than outhouse fodder. Some of the best bits include a magic mirror conducting a “Dating Game”- like queen selection process for Farquaad; the by now mandatory “Matrix” spoof; and, in what is one of the all-time great bits of inspired lunacy, Farquaad’s interrogation of a gingerbread man (who bears a probably not coincidental resemblance to Mr. Bill of “Saturday Night Live” fame). Along the way, the movie also has time to take a few pokes at professional wrestling and (hooray) Disneyland. Much has been made of the technologically advanced animation work in “Shrek,” and it is certainly impressive. (All of which makes me tremble for the PR juggernaut sure to sweep the land when “Final Fantasy,” an animated science fiction feature that apparently makes great strides towards creating a realistic computer-generated human, hits the theaters this summer.) But when you get right down to it, the quality of the animation is almost irrelevant.

Take a look at “The Simpsons” or “South Park.” Neither show is famous for its sophisticated animation, yet both are famous for being good. The point is that it matters less how you draw something than to what use you put your creations. We take it for granted now that the technical geniuses behind animation (and, for that matter, live action movies) can achieve just about anything that they want to. Effect quality is expected, not optional, and you can find outstanding visual effects almost any night on TV. This bounty has had the paradoxical effect of devaluing visual effects. Once the audience learns to take something for granted, the allure begins to fade. Good visuals may lure you into the theater, but they won't keep you awake. “Shrek” could have been rendered in charcoal stick figures and it would still be a hoot, because the writing is sharp and the voicings are pitch perfect. In one sense, “Shrek” and the anti -Shrek, “Pearl Harbor,” are quite similar: they both make us appreciate good writing. They do it in different ways, though. “Pearl Harbor” does it because the absence of inspired writing renders its 100 million dollars worth of CGI rather moot. “Shrek” does it because the crafty script lets us forget that the characters are only drawings. In a lot of ways, Shrek, Donkey, Farquaad, and Fiona seem more real, and certainly more memorable, than the photogenic heroes of Honolulu. (6/5/2001)