It's not just bitter, retaliatory spite - it's CLUMSY, bitter, retaliatory spite

Rating: 2/10 (21 October 2001)

I can't BELIEVE that this could even be MISTAKEN for good animation. When I saw the trailer I squirmed in my seat, deeply embarrassed on the animators' behalf. Could they have got at least SOMETHING right? Could they have moved at least SOMETHING in a passably convincing fashion?
The answer is a deafening no. The animation is even worse than the cleverly edited trailer let on. The king's subjects move like mannequins with performers standing behind them, jerking the limbs - which may be fair enough, given PDI's evident shortage of skilled character animators, but when one of the central characters (Princess Fiona) moves in the same fashion, it's time to throw up one's hands in despair. (Shrek and the Donkey are the best animated of the lot, but even they twitch their facial muscles like people pulling expressions out of a catalogue, even they gesture as though they're posing for photographs, and even they run as though they're trying not to get anywhere.)
So how DID this come to be mistaken for good animation? I think - but this is just a guess - that the public looks for two things in an animated film: glossiness, and frame-by-frame detail. All the surfaces in Shrek are finely detailed (in an ugly, repetitive, phoney kind of way), and the garishly clashing colours have all been brightly polished and coated with a hideously artificial plastic varnish ... and this, thinks the man in the street, must be what "good animation" is. Rubbish. Good animation involves convincing, expressive MOVEMENT, which makes "Shrek" the most thoroughly shoddy of the six (or seven, depending on how you count) computer-animated films that have so far been released. Even apart from the poor animation the art direction is terrible. Surfaces clash, colours clash, designs and styles and backgrounds clash. Comic and dramatic timing is off. And as if all this weren't bad enough, every single thing the animators have placed before our eyes is just god-damned UGLY. It hurts to look at. It really hurts.
Not that the best art direction in the world could rescue this childish, spiteful, self-consciously flippant story. Ten years ago the unexpected animated success of the year was "Beauty and the Beast"; the animated smash hit ten years later is but a shallow mockery of Beauty-and-the-Beast folktales, complete with fart jokes, and the kind of plot complications one normally sees in Sherwood Schwartz sitcoms. What kind of pea-brained senses of humour do they think we have? (Hey, listen - they're playing modern rock songs, in a medieval fairytale. Ha ha, an anachronism!) I feel as though I've just been harangued by a comedian who thinks his jokes will become funny if he shouts them loud enough. In reality I was haranged by two such comedians. One is Mike Myers, who almost manages to pull off the gruff Scottish accent he's trying for; the other is Eddie Murphy, who seems to be under the delusion that the vocal performance he gave in "Mulan" will be just as funny a second time. It was only funny the first time because Disney's animators were able to supply the humour. The PDI animators aren't.
The sad thing is we've voted for this kind of loud, vulgar rubbish with our wallets, and now we're going to get more and still more of it until one of us, and it will probably be me, goes insane. Do you realise that "Shrek" is so far the biggest box office smash of the twenty-first century, and that it could very well KEEP that title - forever? It's a depressing thought.