‘Shrek’ at 25 - How an Unlikely Ogre Changed Animation Forever
In 2001, Roger Ebert ended his original review of Shrek with a prediction.
“He’s so immensely likable,” he wrote of the big green ogre at the center of DreamWorks Animation’s unlikely fairy tale, “that I suspect he may emerge as an enduring character, populating sequels and spinoffs. One movie cannot contain him.”
It is worth sitting with the modesty of that prediction for a moment. Ebert suspected sequels and spinoffs. What he could not have anticipated – what no one working on the film could have anticipated, given how chaotic and dispiriting its production had been – was that Shrek would become something genuinely singular in the history of popular culture. Not merely a franchise, but a phenomenon. 25 years later, the ogre who just wanted to be left alone in his swamp has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, had an annual festival held in his honor in Madison, Wisconsin for an entire decade, and maintains a presence in internet culture so pervasive and so strange that it has long since transcended anything its creators could have designed.
The story of how Shrek came to exist is the story of a production that few people wanted to work on. When directors Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson first came together to work on the project in 1997, basing it on the 1990 children’s picture book by William Steig, Jenson recalled that being assigned to it felt like being sent to Siberia. Technology that had never been attempted was proving difficult – the complexity of rendering Donkey’s fur and Princess Fiona’s graceful movement represented a level of technical ambition that was still nascent in the field of computer animation. And the film’s central role had to be recast entirely after the original voice, the beloved Saturday Night Live comedian Chris Farley, died at 33 having already recorded much of his performance. His replacement, Mike Myers – not yet the enormous star the Austin Powers films would make him – required some selling to the studio.
That a film produced under these conditions emerged as the most purely enjoyable animated feature of its year – winning the first Academy Award ever given for Best Animated Feature, beating out Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. – is one of the more improbable success stories in Hollywood history.
What made Shrek work, and what has allowed it to endure when so many of its imitators have faded, is a quality that its production history did nothing to guarantee: it had genuine heart. The film is simultaneously heartwarming and sharp-witted, filled with sly in-jokes, contemporary pop culture references, and a sustained satirical commentary on the fairy tale genre that had been Disney’s exclusive province for decades. The Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, the Big Bad Wolf – all of them appear stripped of their Disney associations and deposited in a swamp alongside an ogre who wants nothing to do with any of them. Lord Farquaad, the film’s diminutive villain, surveys his princess options in the manner of a corporate executive making a personnel decision, while the Magic Mirror operates like a game show host. The entire apparatus of the fairy tale is present, but inverted – aware of its own conventions and playfully contemptuous of them.
This was a genuinely novel approach. DreamWorks, still a young studio carrying the personal grievances of co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg against his former employer Disney, had every commercial incentive to take this particular swing. But commercial incentive alone does not produce a film that is still being watched and loved and memed a quarter century later. That requires something more.
What Shrek had was Shrek himself. Ebert identified this in his original review with characteristic directness: beneath all the cleverness, all the technical achievement, all the satirical provocation, there was an ogre worth caring about. A lonely creature with an inferiority complex born of a lifetime of being told he was monstrous – who turned out to be nothing of the kind. His journey is the oldest kind of story: an outcast who discovers that the qualities that made the world reject him are precisely the qualities that make him lovable. The film resists the typical mechanics of the princess narrative not merely by subverting them but by replacing them with something more honest. Fiona’s secret, when it is revealed, is not a curse to be broken but a truth to be accepted. The film’s vision of romantic love is genuinely radical for a family animated feature – it argues not that love makes us into something better than we are, but that love sees what we actually are and chooses it anyway.
Mike Myers’ vocal performance gives Shrek a texture that no amount of technical animation wizardry could have manufactured on its own. The character breathes because Myers breathes life into him – the gruffness that conceals tenderness, the irritability that masks longing, the occasional bewildered delight of a being who has spent his whole life being told he is unworthy of delight. Eddie Murphy’s Donkey is the film’s comic engine, a motormouth whose observations arrive so rapidly and with such commitment that even the most obvious jokes land.
What no one anticipated in 2001 was how completely Shrek would redefine the landscape of animated family filmmaking. The offbeat, ironic, celebrity-voiced, pop-culture-saturated animated feature that has been standard industry practice for two decades traces its DNA directly to that first improbable film. DreamWorks would follow it with Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, and the rest of a catalog that bears its stamp on every frame.
Adamson continued to work on the Shrek films until deciding to only write the story for the third film, handing the director’s reins over to new talent and moving on to spearhead Walden Media’s The Chronicles of Narnia film franchise instead. Now, after three sequels and two spinoffs, the seventh theatrical Shrek film is currently in production, set for release next year. The memes – inexhaustible, surreal, occasionally incomprehensible – continue to propagate across every corner of the internet. The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2020, recognized as a work of cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.
All of this from a project that felt, to some of the people making it, like being exiled to Siberia.
As we all know, ogres are like onions. And so, it seems, is the film about one. Every generation peels back another layer and finds something new – some joke they hadn't caught before, some emotional truth they weren’t old enough to recognize the first time, some reflection of their own desire to be loved not despite what they are but because of it.
Twenty-five years on, Shrek remains, as Smash Mouth once declared, an all star.
He always was.