In my past life, I was a fat b**tard!

Rating: 10/10 (7 June 2001)

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Shrek sure did exceed the expectations. I was expecting some immature comedy that vainly tried to re-capture the stunning success of Toy Story, but it was much more than that. The computer animation is breath taking, I would even say that it is better than Toy Story's, at least in some elements. The humans' faces, for example, was something that Toy Story never got quite right, but they look great here. The animals are amazingly realistic, too. They even managed to make a female dragon look sexy! Now THAT'S an accomplishment in animation science!
(spoilers) There are a lot of themes presented in Shrek, the most prevalent of which is that of being yourself, loving yourself for who you are, and there's probably a bit of the old one about there being someone out there for everyone (Hey, if SHREK can find true love.). Sure, these are all clichés (and, technically, therefore can't officially be themes, I guess, but who's grading this? No one!), but they are presented in a hilarious and entertaining way, if not exactly original or even entirely inventive.

The plot is fairly simple, a bunch of fairy tale creatures are being banished by a prince for some reason, and they all wind up on the swamp property of Shrek, a fearful ogre who lives in the woods and feels too ugly to have contact with any other beings (much like Frankenstein's poor monster). Shrek goes to the prince to get the fairy tale creatures off of his land, who agrees as long as Shrek will travel to a far away kingdom and rescue a princess and bring her back so the prince can marry her. That's about the size of it, but what an adventure! There is also the excellent addition of a talking donkey (who is voiced by Eddie Murphy but looks like Chris Rock) who is Shrek's sidekick and friend throughout the movie.
The fairy tale creatures are some of the best parts of the movie, there's something here from EVERYONE'S childhood. We see everything from the talking gingerbread man (`Do you know the muffin man.?') to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to the talking string puppet who thinks he's a real boy. This is great stuff! There is even a great scene where they parodied (to spectacular effect) some of the shots from The Matrix, and this turns out to be one of the best scenes in the film. You almost want to get up and cheer at the way the princess kicks the asses of all of Robin Hood's men (how's THAT for irony!). Shrek and the donkey are stunned into hilarious silence.

The only scene that didn't seem to have a lot of thought put into it was where the princess is talking to the donkey after having turned into the hideous beast that she transforms into after sunset every night, and she is afraid of what Shrek will think if he finds out that she turns ugly every night. Has she not seen Shrek? He's an ogre! He's the loneliest ogre in the world, and she's worried because she turns into one of his species every night. Come on, princess, wake up and smell the pheromones! You'd think it would be obvious to her that he would be thrilled to learn of her nightly transformation.
There is definitely no shortage of hilarious puns regarding the short stature of the prince. Besides that, James Bond could definitely take some serious knowledge from the effectiveness of the one-liners that seem to appear in Mike Meyers' movies (remember the succession of hilarious one liners in the head scene in Austin Powers?). I'm still not sure why it was so funny that the prince was such a little squirt, but there seemed to be no end to the laughs.
However, the most effective and memorable element of the film is the romance that develops between the princess and Shrek. This romance would be obviously manipulative of the audience and therefore insulting if she had just fallen in love with her rescuer despite his abhorrent appearance, but her nightly transformations make the pair work very well. After Shrek has made it to hers and the prince's wedding just in time to stop her form marrying him, we are entreated to a charming scene (which includes the donkey riding the dragon and hilariously threatening the crowd with it as though it were a weapon - `I've got a dragon and I'm not afraid to use it!') which ends with the princess revealing her condition to Shrek for the first time. As she kisses Shrek, her true love, she lifts into the air, and the spell is lifted from her, as previously explained. I remember sitting there and thinking that the movie was about to be ruined because she would turn into a beautiful princess and Shrek would suddenly become her charming prince, and it was such a relief that this didn't happen!

If they had both turned into beautiful people, the message of the entire film would have been cancelled out, and we would be left with the feeling that poor Shrek could never find true love if he were an ugly ogre, and that no one can truly be happy unless they are beautiful humans. That would have really pi**ed me off. She asks Shrek if he'll love her even if she's not beautiful, and he says, `You are beautiful.' There is no way that this movie could have had a more uplifting and satisfactory ending than that, unless of course, it closed with the donkey and all of the fairy tale creatures singing `I'm a believer' in an excellent outdoor concert.
This is a truly memorable film. It's got its share of childishness, but there can be no mistake about its quality. There is something here for everyone, and the message that it delivers is important in the society that we live in, which is disturbingly concerned with superficiality (hence the quality and success of American Beauty). Bring the kids, the parents, the grandparents, everyone.