make it stop!!!

Rating: 5/10 (29 June 2001)

I first saw this movie on opening day, laughed about five times during the film, mostly at Eddie Murphy, and then left the theater and forgot about it. I sat at my computer, and wrote the following review for imdb: "This film was four years in the making, and they should have scrapped it long, long ago. In a few months, it will be little but an embarassing memory when faced up to Final Fantasy. The animation is bad, and the voice acting is even worse. Mike Meyers' faux Scottish accent is annoying. I have one more suggestion: why only three Smashmouth songs? Why not an entire album? 5/10."
I dismissed it instantly, thinking that it would please small children who still think fart jokes are the pinnacle of humor and then fade into obscurity. Unfortunately, I was dead wrong, and I have no idea why. It is a bad film, I cannot get around that. As many times as I go through it in my mind, it is bad. I did laugh, but not very much. I was more appalled at the potty humor, something which critics and audiences alike flip out over all the time (I rarely do), but everyone seems to be impervious to them in this film. Nothing about the story was original. The climactic scene is copied straight out of Beauty and the Beast, except with a twist which is not one one-hundredth as clever as everyone seems to think it is.

And here's another slap in the face: the animation is not great. No, not at all. Even those who seem to dislike the film on these comment boards tend to praise the animation. Have they not seen the Toy Story movies or A Bug's Life? The animation in those films is infinitely better. Heck, even Small Soldiers surpassed this one by thousands of miles. I would rather watch Toy Story 2 a hundred times than watch five minutes of Shrek's dreck one more time. Also, if you have even seen the briefest clip of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the so-called "realistic" animation of Shrek looks as much like a cartoon as the human characters from Pokemon. Heck, even the characters from Toy Story look more like human beings than the characters of Shrek, AND THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE TOYS!
Shrek is obviously going to have one of the highest grosses of the year, if not the highest. The world is a truly deranged place. I live in a world of children who have taken over and now run the day care center.