Excellent entertainment, sloppy animation

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2001)

I really enjoyed Shrek as light entertainment. There is nothing profound in it, but it neatly, and frequently, skewers fairy tale conventions and characters, especially the Disney ones. One has to watch it a couple of times to catch all the spoken jokes, and probably another time to catch all the visual throwaway gags which hang out in the corners of frames. In this regard the movie is clever, well written, and charming in a low sort of way. It is suitable for all ages, even with mildly borderline subject matter in some of the jokes and references. The little kids will not get the 'worst' ones, while the non prudes on the adult audience will laugh heartily.
A couple of fine scenes include the one with Geppetto turning over Pinocchio to the fairy-tale-creature bounty hunters for a payment in gold (" I got here a talking puppet!"...."But I'm a REAL boy!" ... "Then throw him in the pile with the other possessed toys!"), the duet between the princess and the bluebird, right out of at least three Disney classics, in which the princess wins the high note contest while the little bird, well, loses. And finally, a certain gag pulled countless times by Foghorn Leghorn on a certain chained dog is repeated here with a chained dragon...the setup is obvious, then they make you wait ....for...it, then the inevitable 'yipe!'. Great stuff. Did I mention the cat fight between Snow White and Cinderella?
However, being a fan of good computer animation, I was disappointed in the quality of same in Shrek. Many people have commented on how perfect the animation is here, but they either don't know better, or simply are not paying attention. The CGI folks have come up with some software which provides an improvement in the way skin, muscle, fat, etc., move on the skeletons of the characters; it is better than we have seen before. However, the animators apparently never graduated from cheap Saturday morning cartoon level character movement. Almost without exception, the lead characters move like poorly operated marionettes, the secondary characters are worse yet. Almost any Disney classic was far better in this regard. Another problem was patchy and inconsistent interface between the characters and their environments. For example, walking characters often seem to be levitating slightly above the ground, or perhaps they are failing to depress grass under foot, etc.
Two fine CGI animated films, Antz and A Bug's Life were made concurrently, by Dreanworks and Pixar, respectively. In Antz, the animators were happy to have ants climbing a flower stem which was stiff, lifeless, and had leaves looking like they were plastic. In an almost identical scene from Bug's Life, the stem and leaves were swaying slightly in the air, the leaves were translucent (like real leaves by golly), and the whole assembly of the plant interacted with realism to the movements, shadows, etc. of the characters. It is this inspired attention to detail which makes Pixar the best CGI studio in the world, and why the Dreamworks crew is still the runner up. If only Pixar had made Shrek. Oh, but I still loved it as a whole.