CG storytelling at its finest

Rating: 10/10 (5 November 2001)

There seems to be no end to the CG development! Shrek is the present day climax of that development, in terms of technical efforts combined with storability. We are here given a good old-fashioned fairy tale (with an obvious twist!), told with the good heart of a storyteller wanting to entertain the crowd.
The movie manages to combine a wonderful voice casting with a good and (incredibly) funny story; a superstory in a 3D-animated environment, a world that exists only in the memory of a computer. Despite this, the technical work is done to so much perfection, that you have no hesitations in believing fully in the existence of the settings and of the characters.
We are given the rare phenomenon of a CG romantic story that, within the grounds of a fairy tale, is highly credible. We see the vulnerability of true love in the faces of the hideous ogre Shrek and the fair Princess Fiona, beautifully animated time and time again throughout the entire movie.
That the creators of this movie have managed to perfectionize both the process of making an entire environment out of nothing but zeros and ones, the process of using human facial communication in computer animation and use them both so artistically wonderful, is, I find, the highest feat so far within the animation features. You laugh, you cry and you end up sighing sobbingly after 90 well-spend minutes. Shrek is a wonderful, wonderful movie.