Hard to believe Shrek screened at Cannes this week in 2001, but then that was the moment: Pixar's Toy Story and Toy Story 2 had made computer animation both artful and universal, giving Hollywood a new box of tricks to play with, money to spend, and a renewed sense of creative confidence. Everyone was getting on the boat, or yacht. This was the fledgling DreamWorks studio (and more specifically its ex-Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg) scuzzing up the Mouse House's aesthetic, rubbing Mickey's nose in the mud; in Shrek's opening moments, the kind of picturebook that graced the prologues of Disney's post-War golden age animations is revealed to have been taken into the outhouse by the titular green ogre, its pages used as bog roll before Shrek marches cheerily out of the crapper to the strains of Smash Mouth's "All Star". Welcome back to the summer of 2001: everything was about to go down the pan. New century, new crudeness. Before the decade was out, these voice performers would gift the world The Love Guru, Norbit and The Sweetest Thing; on the road to toppling the tyrannical Lord Farquaad (voiced by John Lithgow), whose surname proves interchangeable with "fuckwad", Shrek (Mike Myers) and Donkey (Eddie Murphy) spend most of their time burping and farting. I'd forgotten just how relentlessly lowbrow the movie is. In the Farquaad-ruled kingdom of Duloc, a singing exhibit rhymes "keep your feet off the grass" with "wipe your... face"; an inexplicably French Robin Hood (Vincent Cassel, for some reason) inspires a song-and-dance number in which the Merry Men do something similar, rhyming "maid" with "he likes to get... paid". Schtick might have been a good alternative title. Stink might be another. If you can hear a low industrial rumbling while revisiting Shrek this weekend, that's surely Uncle Walt, the man who made Fantasia, being rotated in his cryogenic capsule.
If there's been any measure of critical debate over Shrek this past quarter-century, it hinges on just how ugly the film was always meant to be. The animation really is ugly, in the same way the first Toy Story now looks clunky. (Chief takehome: how rapidly processor chips and modelling tech improved over the course of the century's first decades.) Granted, the rough-and-readiness does set Shrek apart from, say, Pixar's comparatively verdant A Bug's Life, engineered only a couple of years before. But it's very rough, from the uncanny humanoid faces (Fiona and Farquaad especially) to the dragon whose firebreathing recalls a PS2 cut scene to the sequence where Shrek and Donkey traverse a field of sunflowers, the Klein-blue sky behind them entirely untroubled by sun, clouds, detail. Watching Shrek in 2026 is a little like watching one of those cheap Russian timewasters the major chains now import - somewhat against the spirit of any trade embargo - to fill Screen 6 during half-term. (It's also closer than you'd think to watching today's AI slop.) It's briskly told at 86 minutes; if you were feeling generous, its sarcastic approach to the fairytale qualifies as a kind of wit. (There are fun bits of comic writing, from Farquaad's interrogation of the Gingerbread Boy - "Do you know the Muffin Man?" - to the use of cue cards at Farquaad and Fiona's wedding.) And I guess it's novel (and very un-Disneyish) that all the characters should seem so fundamentally horny, though again here, we're not so far from those early Internet pages that did blasphemous things to beloved cartoon characters. We've had four of these things in the years since, plus spinoffs, and - one reason for this reissue - there's another to come next year. People apparently love Shrek: we have it (more specifically, a late-film John Cale cover version) to thank/blame for that Noughties revival of the song "Hallelujah", and even Al Pacino, for heaven's sake, has admitted to using a Shrek phone case. But then enough people bought that Crazy Frog record to get it to number one. Sometimes there really can be no accounting for popular taste.
Shrek returns to cinemas nationwide today.
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