10+ / 10
10 / 10
6 / 10
7 / 10
8 / 10
9 / 10
Six Films, Two Masterpieces
Shrek changed animation. Before it, the big animated films were Disney fairy tales, sincere and musical and built around princesses. Shrek took that whole tradition and turned it inside out, with an ogre for a hero, a princess who could fight and a handsome lord for a villain, and it did it with pop songs, fart jokes and real feeling underneath.
The first Shrek still makes me laugh harder than almost any animated film I know, and the second one keeps pace with it. What I love is how rude the film lets the jokes be while it stays warm underneath. I don’t much care for what happened in the middle of the run, but when this series is good it’s so good that I forgive it the lazy years without a second thought.
I give the franchise a 10 on the strength of its first two films and its last. The individual ratings run from the 10+ original down to a 6 for Shrek the Third and back up to a 9 for The Last Wish, and each film gets its own section with the reasons. The middle of the run is weaker, but the high points stand with the best animated films ever made, and they’re what the franchise will be remembered for.
The Book
Shrek began as William Steig’s 1990 picture book, a short, grotesque story about a hideous ogre who is delighted to be hideous. He leaves home, frightens everyone he meets, and marries a princess even uglier than he is, and they live horribly ever after. Steig was a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist, and the book is gleeful, strange and very funny.
The film softens Shrek considerably and adds Donkey, Lord Farquaad and the whole fairy tale parody, but it keeps Steig’s central joke: the monster is the hero, and he’s happy being a monster until someone gives him a reason not to be. That idea runs through every film in the series, and it’s why the good ones work.
Steig died in 2003, two years after the film came out, by which time his grotesque little ogre had become world famous, and a good deal gentler than the one he drew. His book is still worth finding, for its pictures and for the pure, unapologetic delight it takes in being disgusting.
Shrek (2001). 10+/10
Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson directed the original for DreamWorks. Shrek lives alone in a swamp and wants to be left alone. When the tiny, vain Lord Farquaad banishes every fairy tale creature in his kingdom to Shrek’s swamp, Shrek goes to demand his land back, with a talking Donkey attached to him whether he likes it or not.
Farquaad makes a deal: rescue Princess Fiona from a dragon-guarded tower, so that Farquaad can marry her and become king, and the swamp is Shrek’s again. On the way back, Shrek falls for Fiona, and Fiona falls for him, and she has a secret of her own that only comes out at night.
It won the first Academy Award ever given for best animated feature, beating Monsters, Inc., and it deserved to. It’s funny, fast, cleverer than it looks and moving in its last act, when Shrek finally interrupts the wedding and Fiona’s secret is revealed in front of everyone. For me it’s a 10 with room to spare, and it still holds up more than twenty years later.
Mike Myers and the Voice Change
Chris Farley was originally cast as Shrek and recorded most of the part before he died in 1997. Mike Myers took over and recorded the whole role, then asked to redo it with a Scottish accent. The change reportedly cost the studio a great deal in reanimation. The accent turned out to be exactly right.
It gives Shrek a gruff, working-class warmth that makes his grumpiness likeable instead of mean. He’s a loner who’s been rejected all his life and has decided to reject everyone first, and Myers lets you hear the hurt under the growl. It’s a far subtler performance than people remember.
I think the Scottish accent is the smartest decision anybody made on the whole franchise. Read those lines in a flat American voice and Shrek turns into a bully. Myers makes him sound like a man who’s been hurt so often he’s stopped expecting anything else, and if the reanimation bill was the price of that, it was money well spent.
Donkey
Eddie Murphy’s Donkey is one of the great comic voice performances, and much of it was improvised around the script. He talks constantly, sings uninvited, has no sense of personal space, falls in love with a dragon and refuses to be left behind, and he’s the reason the first film is so relentlessly funny.
He’s also, easy as it is to miss, the film’s heart. Donkey is lonely too, an irritating creature nobody wants around, and he attaches himself to Shrek because Shrek is the first person who doesn’t run away from him. Their friendship is the real love story of the first film, and it’s why the ending works.
By the sequels, the franchise leaned too hard on Donkey and on Puss, turning them into joke machines who had to be given something funny in every scene. In the original, the balance between Donkey’s chatter and Shrek’s silence is perfect, and each makes the other funnier. It’s a double act in the old tradition, the talker and the grump, and it’s never been better done in animation.
Fiona and Farquaad
Fiona is the first film’s real twist. She’s a princess who fights like a martial arts star, burps as loudly as Shrek and turns into an ogre every night because of a curse. The ending, where she stays an ogre by choice, is the whole franchise in a sentence: you don’t need to be transformed to be loved. Cameron Diaz plays her with a sly, physical comedy that keeps her from ever being just a prize.
John Lithgow voices Lord Farquaad, and he’s the first film’s perfect villain.
His castle is enormous to make up for his size, a joke the film returns to again and again. He tortures the Gingerbread Man for information in the film’s most quoted scene, and a dragon eats him at his own wedding. Lithgow plays him with total seriousness, and every joke works because of it.
The Gingerbread Man interrogation is my favorite scene in the franchise, and it works because Lithgow plays a tiny tyrant torturing a cookie as if it were a matter of state. Nobody in that room thinks it’s funny, and that’s exactly why I do. I’d happily watch a whole film of Farquaad being petty inside that enormous castle.
Farquaad’s kingdom of Duloc is a clean, soulless theme park with a singing information booth, and it’s a barely concealed jab at Disney. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran DreamWorks, had left Disney on bitter terms, and the first film is full of barbs aimed at his old employer.
For Writers
Fiona chooses to stay an ogre at the end. The whole film has built toward a transformation, and the payoff is that she doesn’t need one.
When you write a story about someone who wants to change, the obvious ending gives them the change. Sometimes the better ending is realizing they didn’t need it. Before writing your ending, ask whether your character’s goal was really what they needed. If not, let them reach it and turn it down.
The Music
The soundtrack was a big part of the first film’s success.
Smash Mouth’s All Star over the opening, as Shrek goes about his muddy morning routine. Rufus Wainwright’s version of Hallelujah over the lonely stretch in the middle, when Shrek and Fiona are apart. And the whole cast singing I’m a Believer at the wedding. The songs made the film feel modern in a way no animated film before it had.
Shrek 2 went further. Its best musical moment is the Fairy Godmother singing Holding Out for a Hero as she chases the heroes in her carriage, a fantastic, over-the-top number that doubles as the climax. The later films kept using pop songs, but with diminishing returns, because a surprise only works once. In the first two, the music felt like a joke on the whole idea of a Disney musical. The joke was fresh.
Shrek 2 (2004). 10/10
The sequel sends Shrek and Fiona to Far Far Away, a kingdom that looks like Beverly Hills with castles, to meet her parents, the King and Queen, voiced by John Cleese and Julie Andrews. They’re horrified that their daughter has married an ogre and become one. The King secretly hires Puss in Boots to kill Shrek, and Puss fails, then joins the heroes.
The villain is the Fairy Godmother, voiced by Jennifer Saunders, a scheming magical businesswoman who wanted her son, Prince Charming, to marry Fiona and inherit the kingdom. She gives Shrek a potion that turns him human and handsome, and the film asks what Fiona would choose if she could have a conventional prince after all.
It’s sharper, funnier and more confident than the first film, and it became the most successful animated film ever released at the time. It’s the rare sequel that’s at least as good as the original, because it finds a new problem for its characters, meeting the family, instead of repeating the old one at larger scale. The Far Far Away satire of Hollywood celebrity is also some of the franchise’s best comedy.
Puss in Boots Arrives
Puss in Boots arrives in Shrek 2 as a hired assassin who fails, and within five minutes he’s the most popular character in the franchise. Antonio Banderas plays him as a Latin lover with the manners of a swashbuckler and the instincts of a house cat. The joke never gets old: the huge, pleading eyes he uses to disarm enemies, the way he’s distracted by a ball of string in the middle of a sword fight.
He’s a perfect addition because he gives Shrek and Donkey someone new to bounce off, and because he’s funny in two languages. The rivalry between Puss and Donkey for Shrek’s attention becomes one of the second film’s best running jokes. He got two films of his own, and the second is the best thing the franchise produced after Shrek 2.
Shrek the Third (2007). 6/10
The third film begins with the King dying and Shrek next in line for a throne he doesn’t want. He sets off to find Fiona’s cousin Arthur, a bullied teenager voiced by Justin Timberlake, to make him king instead. Meanwhile Prince Charming gathers the fairy tale villains to take over Far Far Away, and Fiona and a group of princesses fight back.
It’s the weakest of the run: busy, flat and full of jokes that feel recycled from the first two. The idea of Shrek facing fatherhood, with Fiona pregnant, is a good one and it’s barely explored. It made a lot of money and nobody remembers it with much affection.
This film is the sloppiest of the lot. They had Shrek about to become a father, the most interesting problem the character had faced since the swamp, and they spent the film on a detour with a moping teenage king and a pile of reheated gags. It plays like a product built to keep the franchise on the release calendar.
The princess sequence, with Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty turning out to be fighters, is the best part, and it points toward a better film that never quite got made. Everything else feels like the franchise going through the motions.
Shrek Forever After (2010). 7/10
The fourth film is a better idea. Shrek, worn out by family life, the same routine every day and a village that no longer fears him, makes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin to be an ogre again for one day. The deal is a trick: it erases the day he was born, and he wakes in a world where he never existed, Rumpelstiltskin rules, Fiona leads a band of ogre rebels and she doesn’t know him.
It’s a variation on It’s a Wonderful Life, with ogres. It works better than the third film because it has a real emotional problem at its heart: a man who takes his life for granted and has to win back the woman who loved him. It recovers some of the heart the series had lost. It doesn’t hit the heights of the first two, and the franchise was clearly tired by then.
For Writers
Shrek Forever After erases Shrek from his own life to show him what it was worth. That’s a borrowed structure, and it works because the emotional problem is real.
In a sequel, the danger is repeating the first story at larger scale. The better route is to find the next real problem in your character’s life.
Ask what your character’s success in the first story has cost them, and build the second story around that cost.
Puss in Boots (2011). 8/10
Chris Miller’s spinoff gives Puss his own adventure before he met Shrek. He teams up with his old friend Humpty Dumpty, voiced by Zach Galifianakis, and a sly thief called Kitty Softpaws, voiced by Salma Hayek, to steal the magic beans of Jack and Jill and find the goose that lays golden eggs.
It’s lively, funny and carried by Banderas, and the dance fight between Puss and Kitty is a treat. This is a better film than either of the last two Shrek sequels, and it proved Puss could carry a film on his own. Nobody expected what came next.
It also has a better story than the later Shrek films, a friendship broken by betrayal and slowly repaired, and it gives Humpty Dumpty an unexpectedly sad arc for a talking egg.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022). 9/10
Joel Crawford directed this one. That’s a surprise. Puss has lived recklessly and has used up eight of his nine lives, and Death himself, a wolf with twin sickles who whistles before he appears, is hunting him. Terrified for the first time in his life, Puss hides in a retirement home for cats and then sets out to find a wishing star that could restore his lives.
With Kitty and a relentlessly cheerful dog called Perrito, he’s pursued by Goldilocks and her family of bears, led by Florence Pugh, and by a monstrous Jack Horner, a grown-up version of the nursery rhyme boy who wants the star for himself. The animation mixes computer graphics with a painterly, hand-drawn look in the fights. It’s beautiful.
What makes it special is that it’s about being afraid to die. Puss’s panic attacks, his fear of Death and his final choice to value the one life he has are handled with real seriousness. It’s the best thing the franchise has done since Shrek 2, and among the best animated films of the decade.
Death is the best villain this series ever had, and that whistle is enough to make my shoulders tighten. A film about a cartoon cat having panic attacks had no business working this well, and it’s the reason The Last Wish sits only a point below the first two for me. My one gripe is that it makes the middle of the series look even lazier by comparison.
For Writers
The Last Wish makes a comic cat afraid to die, and treats that fear seriously. A franchise character gets a new emotion after twenty years.
Find the one fear your character has never had to face, and build a story that makes them face it. Take it as seriously as you would with a new character.
With a long-running character, familiarity can become a trap. The reader stops expecting anything new from them.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Shrek works by taking every fairy tale convention the audience knows and turning it over. The princess can fight, the hero is an ogre and the handsome lord is a villain, and the audience’s own expectations become the material for the jokes.
The reader’s expectations in a well-worn genre are something you can use. Every convention they recognize is a chance to surprise them.
List the five things readers most expect from your genre, then keep two, invert two and cut one entirely. Build your story around the two you inverted.
The Verdict on The Shrek Franchise
The first two are essential, and I rate them a 10 or better. The Last Wish is a 9 and the best of the later films. You can skip Shrek the Third. Forever After and the first Puss in Boots are good enough if you’re watching the whole run, and both are better than their reputations.
The 10 is for the peaks, and they’re high enough that the sag in the middle barely registers against them. Two films that took the fairy tale apart and put real feeling back inside it, then a late cat movie about the fear of dying that nobody saw coming. I’ll forgive a franchise almost anything for that, even Shrek the Third.
