It's pretty good

Rating: 8/10 (25 June 2018)

I thought this movie was good overall. I thought it was an interesting and fresh take on fairy tales in general which was what it set out to do. So in that way it was a success. The great thing about this movie is that it will be fresh as long as fairytales (and archetypal stories in general) are around and judging by the past hundreds of years, it looks like that will be a long time. The problem with most movies similar to this is that they are amazing at first but they kind of lose their pizazz. In 2018, for the most part, that hasn't happened yet. Rewatching this movie, a lot of the first half of this movie wasn't amazing. Sure I chuckled a couple of times but it definitely was very standard Dreamworks. In the second half of the story, though, Shrek really comes into its own. It isn't afraid to have its moments to give the viewer an emotional response in a "silly movie with a donkey that yells a lot". This is when I really started to get interested and involved with the characters and story. Seeing this half makes me view the beginning in a much better light. It was building to something, potty jokes included. This said though, that first half being more interesting after viewing the second, still means there are faults in the first half. Mostly the jokes didn't really work for me a lot of the time. I know I'm kind of making the first half sound bad, but in reality it's just fine with nothing more than that. The storyline is fairly engaging in this part, but I just didn't find it particularly funny (except for the jokes about the fairytales which made me laugh). Overall, good movie, great animation (for its time) and engaging story, even with the over abundance of potty jokes.