FILM · 2001 · USA
Shrek
- Directed by
- Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson
- Runtime
- 90 min
- Studio
- Pacific Data Images, DreamWorks Animation, DreamWorks Pictures
390 archived facts 8 topics 1 source Last reviewed Nov 2026
It ain't easy bein' green -- especially if you're a likable (albeit smelly) ogre named Shrek. On a mission to retrieve a gorgeous princess from the clutches of a fire-breathing dragon, Shrek teams up with an unlikely compatriot -- a wisecracking donkey.
390 Interesting Facts About Shrek
Interesting Facts (119)
- #001
After Neil Diamond went to see the DreamWorks animated hit, he heard a group of giggling youngsters singing "I'm a Believer" in the lobby of the theater. "I couldn't resist. I went over and joined in, and we just sang the song together," the 61-year old singer-songwriter revealed in December 2002. "They had no idea that I had written it, or who I was. I was just some weird guy who wanted to join in on the singing."
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After Mike Myers completed his dialogue in his own voice and Shrek's animation was being completed, Myers decided he wanted to give Shrek a Scottish accent. "Once I saw the whole picture, I saw I needed to dig even deeper. And in having Shrek be Scottish, I was able to tap into a certain energy." When his mother, who is from Liverpool, read him books like Babar or Curious George she often gave British dialects to the characters. "It was a happy memory of my childhood, and in Scottish I was able to connect to that." When Mike Myers begged to be allowed to redo Shrek's voice, Jeffrey Katzenberg and his partner Steven Spielberg agreed after hearing a demo, although the decision required the ogre to be reanimated from scratch. "That incident cost us about $5 million," said Katzenberg. "But it's Mike's total creation, and honestly, it made the movie so much better."
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The list of fairytale characters in the movie: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves; the Wicked Witch of the West (or the East); The Three Bears; Pinocchio and Geppetto; the Three Little Pigs; Tinkerbell and Peter Pan; The Big Bad Wolf; The Pied Piper of Hamelin; The Gingerbread Man; Cinderella; the Three Blind Mice; Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Of all the fairytale characters Snow White, Pinocchio, Tinker Bell, Peter Pan and Cinderella are the only ones that are based off of Disney.
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Shrek has become the subject of several internet memes; these range from the infamous 'Shrek is love, Shrek is life' post on 4Chan to re-edits of the entire Shrek movie, i.e. 'Shrek but every time he smiles it gets 5% faster.' These edits quickly gained momentum in 2016 after Bee Movie (2007), another DreamWorks Animation film, gained renewed attention as a meme subject to absurdist editing.
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This is the third, and so far the last, DreamWorks animated film (and the only film in the Shrek series) to have Harry Gregson-Williams team up with John Powell to compose the score (after Antz (1998) and Chicken Run (2000)). Powell was left out to compose scores for later Shrek films with John H. Williams due to a conflict.
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The pre-production on Shrek started in 1995. Dreamworks first hired a motion capture company to develop it, wasting a year and a lot of money. Then, a small crack team took a couple of months to develop a 15-minute 3D demo, using the voices of actors Chris Farley and Janeane Garofalo: very disappointed by the results he saw in the summer of 1997, Jeffrey Katzenberg felt the project did not justify the very high CGI costs. He unsuccesfully shopped the project around to various studios, before hiring PDI (Antz (1998)) to do most of the character work as well as miniatures for backgrounds.
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Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and John Lithgow have all appeared in projects where they played multiple characters: Myers in the Austin Powers movies, Murphy in The Nutty Professor movies, and Lithgow in 3rd Rock from the Sun (1996). Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy also wore fat suits in the movies where they played multiple characters. Mike Myers did so for the character Fat Bastard in Austin Powers 2 and 3 and Eddie Murphy did so in at least the first Nutty Professor movie.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
The film heavily parodies fairy-tales in general. But it also explicitly pokes fun at Disney's movies, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and it sometimes directly parallels Beauty and the Beast (1991). Additionally, DreamWorks Animation (the rights holders of the Shrek films) was bought for $4 billion US by NBC Universal, longtime rival to The Walt Disney Company, in 2016. Walt Disney used to work for Universal Studios the 1920s and 1930s and created Oswald Rabbit for them.
- #052
Contains a major spoiler — show
The film borrows a few ideas from Disney films. Examples include: * (at around 49 mins) Fiona singing with a blue bird, which is a parody of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). * (at around 46 mins) Shrek and Donkey gazing at the stars is a parody of The Lion King (1994), where Simba is taught about the great kings of the past. * (at around 1h 20 mins) Fiona becoming a permanent ogre via mist is a parody of Beauty and the Beast (1991) where Beast returns human. * (at around 6 mins) Donkey flying is a parody of Peter Pan (1953) and Dumbo (1941).
- #053
The lead voice actors never met each other. Each recorded their parts separately, with a reader feeding them their lines. John Lithgow later admitted he enjoyed playing Lord Farquaad but was somewhat disappointed that he never worked directly with Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz or Eddie Murphy.
- #054
(At about 2 minutes) Smash Mouth's "All Star," heard in the opening title sequence, was only a placeholder for test screenings until a new song could be found. Test audiences loved it, however, and the producers kept it. Once they decided to keep "All Star," they also decided to let the band perform "I'm a Believer," the film's final song.
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(At about 10 minutes) Shrek author William Steig also wrote a children's book titled "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble." In the book, a donkey has a magic pebble and, afraid of a lion, wishes to become a rock to protect himself. This is referenced in Shrek in Donkey's famous line "I like that boulder, that is a nice boulder."
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Fiona's goal was to create the most photorealistic CGI depiction of a human. Before this, people rendered through CGI had a certain stiffness, and their facial features remained somewhat blank. To this end, the animation team enlisted one of Hollywood's leading beauty experts to explain how she applied makeup to stars.
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After Mike Myers had completed his dialogue in his own voice and Shrek's animation was finished, Myers decided he wanted to give Shrek a Scottish accent. "When I saw the whole picture, I saw that I had to go deeper. And because Shrek is Scottish, I was able to tap into a certain energy." His mother, who was from Liverpool, often gave characters English dialects when she read him books like Babar or Curious George. "It was a happy memory of my childhood, and in Scottish I was able to connect to that." When Mike Myers begged to be allowed to redo Shrek's voice, Jeffrey Katzenberg and his partner Steven Spielberg agreed after hearing a demo, but the decision required the ogre to be re-animated from scratch. "That incident cost us about 5 million dollars," Katzenberg said. "But it's Mike's total creation, and honestly, it made the movie so much better."
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Shrek was nearly made with stop-motion animation, but the first tests were too costly and executives were unhappy with the main character's overall look and lack of facial expression. After live-action miniatures and motion-capture graphics also proved inadequate, the studio turned to computer-generated animation.
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Fiona was initially planned to be so realistic that she looked human. However, next to an ogre and a talking donkey, a damsel in distress who looked too human seemed out of place. In an interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg, he said: "When we put Fiona in the film, which is a fairy-tale world, she looked completely wrong. She stood out. She didn't fit. She looked bad… It looked like we'd made a mistake." Co-director Andrew Adamson added: "When you have a talking donkey, you have room to move because no one has seen one. Fiona had to be stylized a bit so she would fit into this slightly surreal, explanatory world."
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Radio Disney was told not to air any advertising for the film on the station, stating: "Due to recent dealings with The Walt Disney Company, we are being asked not to align ourselves with this new release Shrek for promotional purposes. Stations can only accept spot dollars in individual markets." The restriction was later relaxed to allow ads for the film's music album to air on the network.
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(Approximately 24 minutes) Director Andrew Adamson chose to replace the earlier tournament scene with a WWF spoof because adding a wrestling scene to the already-written contest would have made the scene too long: "If you're doing comedy and parody, you want to stick to one idea to keep it clean," Adamson said. "We felt this sequence worked best essentially as a WWF parody. [Previously], there were a lot of jokes about traditional tournament ideas; guys coming out to joust and Shrek grabbing the jousting poll and turning it around. He would still do the thing where he pulls the nail out of the beer keg and turns the whole field to mud, and we had him water-skiing or mud-skiing behind one of the horses holding on to the horse's tail. The tail is an aesthetic choice you make as you go."
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Producer John H. Williams got the idea to adapt Shrek from his sons, who were then of preschool age. "It came to me like a Nickelodeon-type project. They were very successful at the time because kids want iconoclastic things. I had never done that before or since, but I immediately and effectively greenlit Shrek by telling Jeffrey Katzenberg it would work. I had other options; Miramax was also interested in it and wanted to use Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). And James and the Giant Peach (1996). Henry had a special deal with Miramax and I knew he was an impressive, talented man, but DreamWorks immediately said 'We're going to make this movie.' You know what? The process started right away. We began creating characters simultaneously with our first work on the draft with the writers. To me it was also the greatest process, because there were so many voices, including story draft artists and animators, who weighed in on the evolution of the process and had a big impact. In a way it was a much more collaborative endeavor than a live-action film. All of the named writers made important, notable contributions, but the storyboard artists also made a huge and unrecognized contribution to the story…".
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Contains a major spoiler — show
At about 1 minute, the opening storybook tells of Fiona's appearance, where she was kept and her curse, as well as the frozen-frame bonus after Shrek tears the page and the wedding at the end. In fact, both weddings appear: Fiona and Farquaad's, then Shrek and Fiona's.
- #097
At about 1 hour 9 minutes, when Shrek, Donkey and Fiona are isolated from one another, John Cale's 1991 cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" plays. Before choosing their directors, Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson tried several other sad songs for "Hallelujah." After settling on "Hallelujah," they ultimately decided that Cale's version was the one best suited to the scene. However, rock musician Robbie Robertson, one of those responsible for the film's music, barred the use of Cale's version on the soundtrack because Cale had no relationship with DreamWorks Records. Instead, DreamWorks recording artist Rufus Wainwright was set to record the song for the soundtrack, but Adamson, judging Wainwright's version "too full" and "too rich," felt "the rawness of John Cale's version seemed to suit the character of Shrek a little better," so Cale's version was kept in the film.
- #098
In the early stages of development, Shrek was to encounter a witch who would guide him on his journey. He would take Donkey as a slave he would probably rescue, or he would let him follow Shrek. In later drafts, there was instead to be a scene in which Shrek, Fiona and Donkey pass through a magical forest and go to a witch's gingerbread house, meeting a witch named Dama Fortuna from the Hansel and Gretel story. Her entire front yard was completely booby-trapped with lasers and sticks rising from the ground. Shrek had to overcome all of it. As he tried to do a military leap and somersault to get into the house and rescue Fiona and Donkey, cute little rabbits hopped and shot arrows at him. He too gets caught in the trap, and while the witch stirs a brew, the three of them are left hanging beside a cauldron, and the three work together to turn the witch's spell back on her. The sequence was cut because it was too long. The character got far enough along to be designed with maquettes and concept art, and was to be voiced by Linda Hunt, who would have been added alongside the four main stars in the marketing.
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The producers also cut numerous cameos of famous fairy-tale characters from the early storyboard scripts. When Shrek scares off a gang of monster hunters at the start of the film, he was originally meant to meet Mary, who was searching for her lost lamb. Vicky Jenson said Mary was cut to simplify the introduction of the fairy-tale subplot and to establish Shrek as a lonely figure no one would want to meet.
- #101
(At about 25 minutes) After Shrek and Donkey defeat the knights in the tournament, Shrek turns to the crowd and says, "Try the veal." The line is part of what Sollozo says to Captain McClusky when they meet Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Both lines come just before a major character experiences a life-changing moment.
- #102
Contains a major spoiler — show
(At about 29 minutes) While climbing the fiery mountain to rescue Princess Fiona, Donkey says "My mouth was open and everything" when Shrek thinks he has passed wind. Eddie Murphy (Donkey) had used the same line in his stand-up comedy film Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983) while talking about "You could fart in your friend's face while watching the game, he don't care…".
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By 1997 the project had been completely reorganized: director Ron Tippe was replaced by Kelly Asbury, who would soon also be replaced by Andrew Adamson, who went on to Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002). John Garbett resigned after producer and writer Aron Warner was hired. The film's first act was rewritten and a star cast was persuaded to join the project. The troubled film then seemed to rise quickly from its own ashes. When Mike Myers joined the team, Andrew Adamson admitted: "We went back to the drawing board to adapt to Mike's talents. Suddenly, with Mike in the lead, the giant character began to have a Scottish accent. The outtakes are hysterical. It's really too bad this is only a 90-minute film."
- #105
Shrek has become the subject of many internet memes, ranging from the notorious "Shrek is love, Shrek is life" post on 4Chan to re-edits of the entire Shrek film, such as "Shrek but it gets 5% faster every time he smiles." These edits gained rapid momentum in 2016, after another DreamWorks Animation film, Bee Movie (2007), regained interest as a meme subject of absurd re-editing.
- #106
(At about 1 hour 22 minutes) The line "God bless us, every one," spoken by Gingerbread Man (walking on a crutch) during the closing "I'm a Believer" song, originally comes from Charles Dickens's book "A Christmas Carol," where it is spoken by Tiny Tim (who also uses a crutch). It also ends nearly every film adaptation of the book.
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Pre-production on Shrek began in 1995. DreamWorks first hired a motion capture company to develop it, but spent a year and a lot of money doing so. A small crack team then spent several months developing a 15-minute 3D demo using the voices of actors Chris Farley and Janeane Garofalo: greatly disappointed by the results he saw in the summer of 1997, Jeffrey Katzenberg felt the project did not justify its very high CGI costs. Before hiring PDI (Antz (1998)) to do most of the character work as well as the background miniatures, he went around to various studios for the project and failed.
- #109
In November 1998, it was announced that DreamWorks was seriously considering releasing the film not only in widescreen theaters but also in IMAX theaters in the IMAX format, which would require the entire animated film to be re-created (and composited). This would give Shrek a true 3D look and put DreamWorks in the record books with the first fully 3D animated feature for IMAX. However, in a surprising move in February 1999, Disney invested in IMAX and planned to release Fantasia 2000 (1999) on IMAX screens starting January 1, 2000.
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Production Story (157)
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In November 1998, it was announced that DreamWorks was seriously considering releasing the movie, not only to Widescreen theaters, but also to IMAX theaters in an IMAX format that would require rerendering (and assembling) the entire animated film. It would give Shrek a true 3D look and put DreamWorks in the record book with the first fully 3D animated feature for IMAX. But in a surprising move in February 1999, Disney invested in IMAX and scheduled Fantasia 2000 (1999) to be released on IMAX screens beginning January 1, 2000.
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By 1997, the project was then completely re-tooled: director Ron Tippe was replaced by Kelly Asbury, who would soon move on to Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) and Andrew Adamson, John Garbett stepped down as producer and writer Aron Warner was hired. The first act of the movie was re-written, and an all-star cast convinced to join the project. The troubled movie then seemed to quickly rise from its own ashes. Once Mike Myers came on board, Andrew Adamson admitted "we went back to the drawing board to tailor it to Mike's talents. Suddenly, with Mike in the lead, the ogre character came to have a Scottish accent. The out-takes are hysterical. It's really too bad this could only be a 90-minute movie."
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The filmmakers also cut a lot of cameos from famous fairy tale characters from the early storyboard scripts. In the beginning of the movie when Shrek scares off a gang of ogre hunters, he was originally supposed to encounter Mary searching for her lost lamb. Vicky Jenson said Mary got cut to simplify the introduction of the fairy tale subplot and establish Shrek as a loner nobody wanted to meet.
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Shrek was almost made in stop-motion animation, but early tests proved too costly and executives weren't pleased with the overall look and lack of facial expression in the main character. After live-action miniatures and motion-capture graphics also proved unsatisfactory, the studio went with computer-generated animation.
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Chris Farley was originally cast as Shrek and even recorded almost all of the dialogue. However, after his death, the role was given to fellow Saturday Night Live (1975) performer Mike Myers. Shrek's "air quotes" in the film is an homage to Farley, whose character Bennett Brauer also used air quotes. A story reel featuring a sample of Farley's recorded dialogue was leaked to the public in August 2015.
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Radio Disney was told not to allow any ads for the film to air on the station, stating, "Due to recent initiatives with The Walt Disney Company, we are being asked not to align ourselves promotionally with this new release Shrek. Stations may accept spot dollars only in individual markets." The restriction was later relaxed to allow ads for the film's soundtrack album onto the network.
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Robin Williams was going to have a role in the film, but he refused to work with producer Jeffrey Katzenberg again. The reason was that years prior, during the production of Aladdin (1992), Williams had a bitter falling out with Katzenberg, who was the chairman of Disney when that film was made.
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Nicolas Cage was initially offered the role of Shrek but he turned it down because he did not want to look like an ugly ogre. In 2013, Cage admitted that he regrets the decision, and explained: "When you're drawn, in a way it says more about how children are going to see you than anything else, and I so care about that." Cage would later appear in The Croods movies which are also distributed by Dreamworks.
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(at around 2 mins) The song "All Star" by Smash Mouth, heard in the opening credits, was only a placeholder for test screenings until a new song could be found. But test audiences loved it, and the producers kept it in. When the producers decided to keep "All Star" they decided to let the band perform the last song in the movie, "I'm a Believer."
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In August 2022, animation tests made in 1996 depicting Shrek's original design were uploaded on YouTube. They involve Shrek dancing down the streets of a town and coming across a mugger who tries to rob him, only for him to be frightened by his appearance and being thrown up into the air by Shrek.
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(at around 24 mins) Mike Myers was hesitant about succeeding the role of Shrek from Chris Farley, due to them being friends and believing it was disrespectful to do so. But after thinking it over and the producers all telling Myers: "Can't we just settle this over a pint?," he decided to take on the role. And that line was eventually used in the final cut of the film.
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Eddie Murphy and Jeffrey Katzenberg have known each other since the beginning of their film careers. They promised that one day, they would do an animated film together, which culminated with this film. Katzenberg even recommended Murphy for the part of Donkey, and no-one else. He thinks its Murphy's best work.
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Jeffrey Katzenberg first approached Mike Myers about starring in Shrek after they attended the premiere of Saving Private Ryan (1998), another DreamWorks production. When Myers first heard the title, he responded, "Well, that's the worst fucking title I've ever heard in my life. It's the sound you make after drinking too many Molson Canadians. 'Agh! Shreck!'"
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(at around 24 mins) Director Andrew Adamson chose to replace the earlier tournament scene with the WWF spoof because to add the wrestling sequence to the already scripted competition would have made the scene too long: "If you're doing comedy and parody, you want to stick to one idea to keep it clean," Adamson said. "We felt like that sequence worked best as mainly a WWF parody. [Before], it was basically just a whole lot of gags around traditional tournament ideas; guys coming out jousting and Shrek grabbing the jousting poll and flipping them over. He would have still done the thing where he knocked the spickett out of the ale keg and turned the whole field to mud, and we had him waterskiing, or mudskiing, behind one of the horses holding onto the horse's tail. It's an aesthetic choice you make as you're going."
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During early development, Shrek would've stumbled on a witch to help him guide him through his journey. She would've had Donkey as a slave that Shrek would've possibly rescued or she would let him follow Shrek. In later drafts, instead there was supposed to be a scene later on where Shrek, Fiona, and Donkey go through an enchanted forest and end up at a witch's gingerbread house to meet the witch from the Hansel and Gretyl story named Dama Fortuna. Her whole front lawn was completely booby trapped with lasers and sticks that come out of the ground. Shrek had to dive through all these things. Cute little bunnies would jump up and shoot blow darts at him as he tried to do a military jump and tumble to get into the house and save Fiona and Donkey. He ends up getting trapped himself and the three of them are hanging near a cauldron while this witch is mixing a brew and the three of them sort of work together to turn her spell back on her. It was cut due to being too long of a sequence. This character went as far as being designed through maquettes, concept arts and was supposed to be voiced by Linda Hunt, who would've been added with the main four stars in the marketing.
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The film's story originally followed the adventures of a teenage ogre who just didn't want to lurk around the swamp and frighten people. Shrek (who was basically a sweet, well intentioned soul) wanted to do good. His ultimate dream was to become a knight and rescue fair damsels in distress. In this version of the film, Princess Fiona was voiced by rather gruff, sarcastic female comic Janeane Garofalo. The princess was the one who didn't trust people, and it was Shrek's sweetness, kind heart and good nature that eventually caused Fiona to open her eyes and learn that it was wrong to judge a person just based on how they looked. According to Jim Hill Media, "Were you to ask the folks at Dreamworks, they'd probably still tell you that the Chris Farley version of Shrek would have been infinitely better than the Michael Myers/Cameron Diaz version that the studio eventually released in May of 2001," but in December 1997, the tragic passing of Chris Farley caused a ripple effect, because he was no longer available to record the rest of his dialogue for Shrek's title character, Dreamworks had no choice but to chuck everything that they'd done up until that point and start the movie from scratch. This mean recasting the role. But Chris's fellow SNL-er Mike Myers seemed incapable of playing a sweet, sincere character, which meant that the ogre's part in the picture was going to have to be radically rewritten to play to Myers's strengths. Which is how the gruff, emotionally remote version of the film's title character came in being. Of course, given that the title character of Shrek was now going to be sarcastic and nasty, that meant that the role of Princess Fiona would have to be rewritten as well. Which is why Garofalo suddenly found herself out on the street while Cameron Diaz was brought in to play the kinder, gentler version of Fiona.
Shrek (2001): The Shrek character and Princess Fiona pose with visitorsImage: Wikimedia Commons · Arun Katiyar from Bangalore, India, CC BY-SA 2.0 - #156
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Co-director Andrew Adamson frequently found himself at loggerheads with Jeffrey Katzenberg over the film's adult jokes. Katzenberg thought that some of the more adult material was inappropriate for an animated film, Adamson disagreed. Adamson could be perceived as winning the argument as many critics liked the film for the fact that it didn't just pander to under-age audiences.
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Producer John H. Williams got the idea to adapt Shrek from his then pre-school aged sons. "To me it smacked of being a Nickelodeon type project. At the time they were very successful because kids want stuff that is iconoclastic. I've never had it before or since, but Shrek was effectively given a greenlight on the spot by Jeffrey Katzenberg who said that he was going to make it. I had other options, Miramax had been interested in it also and had wanted to use Henry Selick who [directed] The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996). Henry entered an exclusive deal with Miramax and I knew that he was an impressive, talented guy, but DreamWorks on the spot said, 'We will make this movie.' You know what? The process began immediately. We started doing character creation simultaneously with the earliest work on the outline with the writers. To me, it was the coolest process too, because there were so many voices that weighed in and made a huge impact in the evolution of it, which included storyboard artists and animators. It was much more of a collaborative enterprise than a live action film in a way. The credited writers all made an important, significant contribution, but the storyboard artists also made a huge and unrecognized story contribution..."
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(at around 1h 9 mins) When Shrek, Donkey and Fiona are isolated from each other, John Cale's 1991 cover of "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen plays. Before choosing "Hallelujah," directors Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson tried several other sad songs. Upon settling on "Hallelujah," they eventually decided that Cale's version was the best fit for the scene. However, rock musician Robbie Robertson, who was one of the people in charge of the film's soundtrack, forbade the usage of Cale's version on the soundtrack, due to Cale having no affiliation with DreamWorks Records. Instead, DreamWorks recording artist Rufus Wainwright was drafted to record the song for the soundtrack, but Cale's version was kept in the film itself, because Adamson considered Wainwright's version "too full" and "too rich," and felt that "the rawness of John Cale's version seemed to suit the character of Shrek a little better."
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Shrek was adapted into a stage musical in 2008 with music by Jeanine Tesori and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire. The original cast included Brian d'Arcy James as Shrek, Sutton Foster as Princess Fiona, Daniel Breaker as Donkey and Christopher Sieber as Lord Farquaad. A high definition recording of Shrek the Musical (2013) was released on DVD/Blu-Ray and on streaming in 2013.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
(at around 1 min) The opening storybook sets up the appearance of Fiona, as well as where she is being held and her curse, as well as, in a freeze-frame bonus after Shrek tears the page out, the wedding at the end. Both of them, actually--Fiona and Farquaad's, then Shrek and Fiona's.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
(at around 1h 3 mins) The original script had Princess Fiona born an ogre to the late King and Queen of Duloc. They had her locked in the tower under the lie that she was "of such rare beauty" she was kidnapped. They died, and the kingdom was left under the rule of an ambitious regent (implied to be Farquaad). When she 'became of age' to ascend the throne she escaped the tower and encounters a witch named Dama Fortuna - who has narrated the entire sequence through her tarot cards. She gave Fiona a potion which would make her beautiful; but warned her the potion had a side effect - she would change between her human and ogress form until she found her true love. Later she was whisked away by her dragon guardian and returned to the tower. This storyline was not adapted to keep the story simple, but is mentioned through the "witch" Fiona tells Donkey about.
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Storyboards were made for an additional scene laying out Lord Farquaad's plan for Duloc, but it was never filmed. He wanted to turn the entire kingdom into something resembling a giant shopping complex. Another planned and cancelled scene had Fiona taking Shrek and Donkey getting lost on the way back to Duloc.
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Chris Farley was originally cast as Shrek and even recorded almost all of the dialogue. After his death, however, the role went to Saturday Night Live (1975) performer Mike Myers. Shrek's "air quotes" in the film are a tribute to Farley, whose character Bennett Brauer also used air quotes. A story reel featuring a sample of Farley's recorded dialogue leaked to the public in August 2015.
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(At about 2 minutes) Smash Mouth's song "All Star," heard in the opening title sequence, was only a placeholder for test screenings until a new song could be found. But test audiences loved it and the producers kept it. When the producers decided to keep "All Star," they also decided to let the band perform "I'm a Believer," the film's final song.
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(At about 24 minutes) Mike Myers was hesitant about taking the role of Shrek from Chris Farley, because they were friends and he believed doing so would be disrespectful. But after thinking it over carefully and being told by the producers, "Can't we just settle this over a pint?," he decided to take the role. And that line ended up being used in the film's final cut.
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(At about 23 minutes) The line "You're on your way to a smacked bottom" was improvised by Mike Myers after he got annoyed with one of the directors. He had also used the line a few years earlier while playing the character Austin Powers in the popular music video for Madonna's song 'Beautiful Stranger.'
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(At about 14 minutes) When the fairy-tale creatures arrive at Shrek's swamp, you can see Papa Bear comforting Baby Bear by the fire. Later, in Lord Farquaad's castle (at about 49 minutes), while watching Fiona through the mirror, you see Mama Bear skinned and lying on the floor as a rug. Her ultimate fate, however, looks good: she reappears dancing with Papa and Baby Bear in the Video/DVD karaoke scene.
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Co-director Andrew Adamson often found himself at odds with Jeffrey Katzenberg over the film's adult jokes. Katzenberg felt some of the adult material was inappropriate for an animated film, while Adamson disagreed. Since many critics liked the film precisely because it was not aimed only at underage viewers, Adamson can be seen as having won the argument.
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Eddie Murphy and Jeffrey Katzenberg have known each other since the beginning of their film careers. They promised each other that one day they would make an animated film together, and they achieved that with this film. Katzenberg even recommended Murphy, and no one else, for the role of Donkey. He considers it Murphy's best work.
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(About 10 minutes in) Shrek's author William Steig also wrote a children's book called "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble." In that book, a donkey has a magic pebble and, afraid of a lion, wishes to become a rock to protect himself. This is referenced in Shrek in Donkey's famous line "I like that boulder, that is a nice boulder."
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(About 1 hour 3 minutes) In the original script, Princess Fiona was born a monster to Duloc's late King and Queen. They locked her in the tower with the lie that she "possessed such rare beauty," and she was kidnapped. They died and the kingdom fell under the rule of an ambitious regent (implied to be Farquaad). To take the throne, she escaped from the tower "when she came of age" and met a witch named Dame Fortuna, who told the whole scene through tarot cards. She gave Fiona a potion that would make her beautiful; but warned her that the potion had a side effect; she would shift between her human and ogre forms until she found her true love. She was later kidnapped by the dragon guardian and returned to the tower. This story was not adapted in a way that kept the story simple, but it is mentioned through the "witch" that Fiona tells Donkey about.
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Fiona's goal was to create the most photorealistic CGI depiction of a human being. Before this, people brought to life through CGI had a certain stiffness, and their facial features remained somewhat blank. To that end, the animation team brought in one of Hollywood's leading beauty experts to explain how she did the makeup of stars.
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When John Lithgow was asked whether the film's adult-oriented jokes were too inappropriate for children, he replied: "No, as long as it's done right. One of the things I always loved in British Theatre was the annual Christmas English pantomimes, which were old, stale fairy tales staged as musicals. The principal boy is played by a girl and the ugly sisters are played by men in dresses. The "Peter Pan" musical was largely similar to this tradition. A special tradition developed over centuries, the ability to put on a show where adults and children laugh at the same jokes at the same time, and adults especially enjoy it, because there is a very big, exciting moment when the children get the payoff of these jokes, and that's what "Shrek" is about. In a way, that's what we always try to achieve." It appeals to many different audiences at once, as in "3. Rock".
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After Mike Myers completed his dialogue in his own voice and Shrek's animation was finished, Myers decided he wanted to give Shrek a Scottish accent. "When I saw the whole picture, I saw that I needed to go deeper. And thanks to Shrek being Scottish, I was able to tap into a certain energy." His mother, who was from Liverpool, often gave the characters English dialects when she read him books like Babar or Curious George. "It was a happy memory of my childhood, and in Scottish I was able to connect to that." When Mike Myers begged to be allowed to redo Shrek's voice, Jeffrey Katzenberg and his partner Steven Spielberg agreed after listening to a demo, but the decision required the ogre to be re-animated from scratch. "That incident cost us about 5 million dollars," said Katzenberg. "But it's Mike's total creation, and honestly, it made the movie so much better."
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An additional scene laying out Lord Farquaad's plan for Duloc was storyboarded but never filmed. He wanted to turn the entire kingdom into something resembling a giant shopping complex. Another planned and cancelled scene had Fiona taking Shrek and Donkey getting lost on the way back to Duloc.
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The film's story initially centered on the adventures of a young ogre who hid in a swamp and did not want to scare people. Shrek (essentially a sweet, well-meaning spirit) wanted to do good deeds. His greatest dream was to become a knight and rescue beautiful young girls in distress. In this version of the film, Princess Fiona was voiced by the rather grumpy, sarcastic female comedian Janeane Garofalo. It was the princess who did not trust people, and Shrek's sweetness, good heart and good nature eventually opened Fiona's eyes and taught her that it is wrong to judge a person by appearance alone. According to Jim Hill Media, "if you asked the people at Dreamworks, they'd probably tell you that Chris Farley's version of Shrek would have been far better than the Michael Myers/Cameron Diaz version that the studio eventually released in May 2001." However, Chris Farley's tragic death in December 1997 had a ripple effect, because he was no longer available to record the rest of his dialogue for Shrek's main character. Dreamworks had no choice but to set aside everything it had done up to that point and start the film from scratch. This meant recasting the role. However, Chris's SNL colleague Mike Myers seemed ill-suited to playing a sweet, sincere character, which meant that the ogre's role in the film had to be radically rewritten to play to Myers's strengths. This is how the grumpy, emotionally distant version of the film's main character came about. Of course, given that Shrek's main character would now be sarcastic and obnoxious, this meant that Princess Fiona's role also had to be rewritten. So while Cameron Diaz was hired to play a nicer, gentler version of Fiona, Garofalo suddenly found herself out on the street.
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One of the hardest parts of creating the film was making Donkey's fur flow properly without looking like the fur of a Chia Pet. This fell to the surface-covering animators, who used flow controls within a complex shader to give the fur many properties (direction changes, standing straight, swirls, and so on). At the time, making the fur respond to environmental conditions was the job of the visual effects group led by Ken Bielenberg. Once the technology was mastered, it could be applied to many aspects of Shrek, including grass, moss, beards, eyebrows and even the threads on Shrek's tunic. Making human hair realistic was different from Donkey's fur; it required a separate rendering system and a great deal of attention from the lighting and visual effects teams.
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(At about 56 minutes) The film also hints that Fiona's identity is something other than an ordinary human princess. For example, at one point the trio is walking through a field infested with insects, and Fiona uses a spider web stretched between two branches to trap the insects. She wraps the web around a sweet, candy-like snack and gives it to Shrek to eat. After doing so, she licks her fingers, implying that she shares Shrek's appetite for disgusting foods that are generally inedible for humans. She later says the field mouse recipe is delicious and looks into it.
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Fiona was initially planned to be so realistic that she looked human. However, next to an ogre and a talking donkey, a damsel in distress who looked too human seemed inappropriate. In an interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg, he said: "When we put Fiona in the film, which is a fairy tale world, she looked completely wrong. She stood out. She didn't fit. She looked bad… It looked like we'd made a mistake." Co-director Andrew Adamson added: "When you have a talking donkey, you have room to move because nobody has seen one. Fiona had to be stylized a bit to fit into this slightly surreal, explanatory world."
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(At about 24 minutes) Director Andrew Adamson chose to replace the earlier tournament scene with a WWF spoof because adding a wrestling scene to the contest, which had already been written into the script, would have made the scene too long: "If you're doing comedy and parody, you want to stick to one idea to keep it clean," Adamson said. "We felt this sequence worked best essentially as a WWF parody. [Previously], there were a lot of jokes about traditional tournament ideas; men going out to joust and Shrek grabbing the jousting poll and turning it upside down. He would still do the thing where he pulls the nail out of the beer keg and turns the whole field to mud, and we had him water-skiing or mud-skiing behind one of the horses holding on to its tail. The tail is an aesthetic choice you make as you go."
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Producer John H. Williams got the idea to adapt Shrek from his sons, who were of preschool age at the time. "It seemed to me like a Nickelodeon-type project. They were very successful at the time because kids want iconoclastic things. I had never done that before or since, but Jeffrey Katzenberg immediately and effectively greenlit Shrek, saying it would succeed. I had other options; Miramax was also interested in it and wanted to use Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). And James and the Giant Peach (1996). Henry had a special deal with Miramax, and I knew he was an impressive, talented man, but DreamWorks immediately said, 'We're going to make this film.' You know what? The process started right away. We began creating characters at the same time as our first work on the draft with the writers. To me, this was also the most wonderful process, because there were so many voices involved, including story draft artists and animators, who emphasized the evolution of the process and had a great impact. In a way, it was a much more collaborative endeavor than a live-action film. All the aforementioned writers made important, notable contributions, but the storyboard artists also made a huge and unrecognized contribution to the story…"
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The film heavily parodies fairy tales in general. But it also openly mocks Disney films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), and Sleeping Beauty (1959), and at times draws direct parallels with Beauty and the Beast (1991). In addition, DreamWorks Animation, the rights holder of the Shrek films, was acquired in 2016 by NBC Universal, a longtime rival of The Walt Disney Company, for 4 billion US dollars. Walt Disney worked at Universal Studios in the 1920s and 1930s and created Oswald Rabbit for them.
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(At about 1 hour 9 minutes) When Shrek, Donkey and Fiona are isolated from each other, John Cale's 1991 cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" plays. Before choosing their directors, Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson tried several more melancholy songs for "Hallelujah." After settling on "Hallelujah," they ultimately decided that Cale's version was the one that best suited the scene. However, rock musician Robbie Robertson, one of those responsible for the film's music, prohibited the use of Cale's version on the soundtrack because Cale had no relationship with DreamWorks Records. Instead, DreamWorks recording artist Rufus Wainwright was set to record the song for the soundtrack, but Adamson kept Cale's version in the film because he evaluated Wainwright's version as "too full" and "too rich" and felt that "the rawness of John Cale's version seemed to suit the character of Shrek a little better."
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In the early stages of development, Shrek was to encounter a witch who would guide him on his journey. He would probably take Donkey as a slave he would rescue, or he would let him follow Shrek. In later drafts, there was instead to be a scene in which Shrek, Fiona and Donkey pass through a magical forest and go to a witch's gingerbread house, meeting a witch named Dama Fortuna from the Hansel and Gretel story. Her entire front yard was completely booby-trapped with lasers and sticks rising from the ground. Shrek had to overcome all of it. As he tried a military leap and somersault to get into the house and rescue Fiona and Donkey, cute little rabbits jumped and shot arrows at him. He too gets caught in the trap, and while the witch stirs a brew, the three of them hang beside a cauldron, and the three work together to turn the witch's spell back on her. The sequence was cut because it was too long. This character got far enough along to be designed with maquettes and concept art, and was to be voiced by Linda Hunt, who would have been added alongside the four main stars in the marketing.
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The producers also cut a large number of cameos by famous fairy-tale characters from the first storyboard scripts. At the beginning of the film, when Shrek scares off a gang of monster hunters, he was actually to meet Mary, who is looking for her lost lamb. Vicky Jenson said Mary was cut to simplify the introduction of the fairy-tale subplot and to make Shrek a loner whom no one would want to meet.
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(Around 25 minutes in) After Shrek and Donkey defeat the knights in the tournament, Shrek turns to the crowd and says: "Try the veal." This line is part of what Sollozo says to Captain McClusky when they meet Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Both lines come before a major character experiences a life-changing moment.
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(Around 29 minutes) While climbing the fiery mountain to rescue Princess Fiona, Donkey says "My mouth was open and everything" when Shrek thinks he passed wind. Eddie Murphy (Donkey) had used the same line in his stand-up comedy film Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983) while talking about "You could fart in your friend's face while watching the game, he don't care…"
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By 1997 the project had been completely reorganized: director Ron Tippe was replaced by Kelly Asbury, who would soon be replaced in turn by Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) and Andrew Adamson. John Garbett resigned after producer and writer Aron Warner was hired. The film's first act was rewritten and a star-studded cast was persuaded to join the project. The troubled film then seemed to quickly rise from its own ashes. When Mike Myers joined the team, Andrew Adamson admitted: "We went back to the drawing board to adapt to Mike's talents. Suddenly, with Mike in the lead role, the giant character began to have a Scottish accent. The exits are hysterical. It's really too bad this is only a 90-minute film."
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(At about 1 hour 22 minutes) The line "God bless us, every one," spoken by the Gingerbread Man (walking on a crutch) during the "I'm a Believer" song at the end, originally comes from Charles Dickens's book "A Christmas Carol," spoken by Tiny Tim (who also uses a crutch). It also ends almost every film adaptation of the book.
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(At about 6 minutes) When everyone lines up to sell their magical creatures, Kathleen Freeman voices the woman with the Donkey. At one point she says "No! No!" The same is said in The Blues Brothers (1980), in which she plays a nun, and Jake offers to take her money to save the orphanage and says "No! No! I will not take your…"
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This is the third and so far last DreamWorks animated film (and the only film in the Shrek series) that had Harry Gregson-Williams composing the music together with John Powell (after Antz (1998) and Chicken Run (2000)). Powell was later left out of composing the music for subsequent Shrek films with John H. Williams due to a disagreement.
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The film became the best-selling DVD of all time in a little over four weeks. With more than 5.5 million DVDs sold to consumers in North America, the big green Ogre surpassed the previous record holder Gladiator (2000) (which reached sales of over 5 million in a year). Retailers bought a total of 7.3 million Shrek DVDs, and DreamWorks had to keep producing new copies to prevent the product from selling out before the holidays. Kelley Avery, DreamWorks Home Entertainment's worldwide president, said, "This unprecedented sales rate confirms that the Shrek DVD is sought after not only by the DVD collector but also by a wide range of Shrek film fans, including families with children, teenagers, adults and everyone in between."
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Pre-production on Shrek began in 1995. DreamWorks first hired a motion capture company to develop it, but spent a year and a great deal of money. A small crack team then spent several months developing a 15-minute 3D demo using the voices of actors Chris Farley and Janeane Garofalo: Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was deeply disappointed by the results he saw in the summer of 1997, felt the project did not justify its very high CGI costs. Before hiring PDI (Antz (1998)) to handle most of the character work as well as the background miniatures, he went around to various studios for the project and failed.
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In November 1998, it was announced that DreamWorks was seriously considering releasing the film not only in widescreen theaters but also in IMAX theaters in the IMAX format, which would require the entire animated film to be re-rendered (and composited). This would give Shrek a true 3D look and would put DreamWorks in the record books with the first fully 3D animated feature for IMAX. However, in a surprising move in February 1999, Disney invested in IMAX and planned to release Fantasia 2000 (1999) on IMAX screens starting January 1, 2000.
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Near the beginning of the film, fairy tale creatures are captured and "the three bears" are shown in a cage. Later, the father bear and the baby bear are seen crying in the background. This is followed by a scene in which Lord Farquaad is shown resting in bed, with a bear-skin rug made from the mother bear in his room.
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Jeffrey Katzenberg approached Mike Myers to star in Shrek after attending the premiere of Saving Private Ryan (1998), another DreamWorks production. When Myers first heard the title, he responded, "Well, that's the worst title I've ever heard. The sound you make after drinking too many Molson Canadians. 'Ah! Shreck!'"
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Behind the Scenes (21)
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The principal actors never met each other. They all read their parts separately, with a reader feeding them the lines. John Lithgow later admitted that, while he enjoyed playing Lord Farquaad, he was a little disappointed that he never actually worked directly with Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, or Eddie Murphy.
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(at around 23 mins) The line "You're on your way to a smacked bottom" was improvised by Mike Myers after he got annoyed at one of the directors. He had also used this line a few years earlier while playing his Austin Powers character in the popular music video of Madonna's song 'Beautiful Stranger.'
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The intent with Fiona was to create the most photorealistic CGI depiction of a human. Prior to this, people animated through CGI had a certain stiffness and the facial features remained a little blank. To this end, the animation team brought in a leading Hollywood beautician to tell them how she applied make-up to A-lister stars.
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One of the most difficult parts of creating the film was making Donkey's fur flow smoothly so that it didn't look like a Chia Pet's fur. This fell into the hands of the surfacing animators who used flow controls within a complex shader to provide the fur with many attributes (ability to change directions, lie flat, swirl, etc.) It was then the job of the visual effects group, led by Ken Bielenberg, to make the fur react to environment conditions. Once the technology was mastered, it was able to be applied to many aspects of the Shrek movie including grass, moss, beards, eyebrows, and even threads on Shrek's tunic. Making human hair realistic was different from Donkey's fur, requiring a separate rendering system and a lot of attention from the lighting and visual effects teams.
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(At about 23 minutes) The line "You're on your way to a smacked bottom" was improvised by Mike Myers after he became annoyed with one of the directors. Years earlier he had also used the line while playing the character Austin Powers in Madonna's popular music video for "Beautiful Stranger."
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One of the hardest parts of creating the film was making Donkey's fur flow properly so that it would not look like the fur of a Chia Pet. This fell to surface-covering animators, who used flow controls within a complex shader to give the fur many properties (direction changes, lying flat, swirls, etc.). At the time, making the fur react to environmental conditions was the job of the visual effects group led by Ken Bielenberg. Once the technology was mastered, it could be applied to many aspects of Shrek, including grass, moss, beards, eyebrows and even the threads in Shrek's tunic. Making human hair realistic was different from Donkey's fur; it required a separate rendering system and a great deal of attention from the lighting and visual effects teams.
Characters & Cast (17)
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Fiona originally was planned to be so real, she looked human. But next to an ogre and a chatty donkey, a too-human-looking princess in peril seemed out of place. In an interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg, he said "When we had placed Fiona in the movie, which is a fairy-tale world, it looked completely wrong. It stood out. It didn't fit. It looked bad... It looked like we made a mistake." Co-director Andrew Adamson added "With a talking donkey, you've got leeway because no one's ever seen one. Fiona had to be a little bit stylized so she fit into this somewhat surreal, illustrative world."
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(At about 24 minutes) Mike Myers hesitated to take the role of Shrek from Chris Farley because they were friends and he believed doing so would be disrespectful. After thinking it over carefully, however, and after the producers told Myers, "Can't we just settle this over a pint?," he decided to take the role. That line ended up being used in the film's final cut.
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Eddie Murphy and Jeffrey Katzenberg have known each other since the beginning of their film careers. They promised each other that one day they would make an animated film together, and they reached that goal with this film. Katzenberg even recommended Murphy, and no one else, for the role of Donkey. He considers it Murphy's best work.
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(About 6 minutes) When everyone lines up to sell their magical creatures, Kathleen Freeman voices the woman holding the Donkey. At one point she says "No! No!" The same line is spoken in The Blues Brothers (1980), in which she plays a nun, when Jake offers to take her money to save the orphanage and she says "No! No! I will not take your…".
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Jeffrey Katzenberg approached Mike Myers to star in Shrek after attending the premiere of another DreamWorks production, Saving Private Ryan (1998). When Myers first heard the title, he replied, "Well, that's the worst title I've ever heard. The sound you make after drinking too many Molson Canadians. 'Ah! Shreck!'".
Easter Eggs & References (45)
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Near the beginning of the film the fairy tale creatures are captured and "the three bears" are shown in a cage. Later, daddy bear and baby bear are seen in the background crying. This is followed by a scene where Lord Farquaad is shown relaxing in bed and there is a bearskin carpet in his room made from mama bear.
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Farquaad sending Shrek to save Fiona for him to get his swamp back could be a parody of the Wizard of Oz, as Oz would only grant Dorothy and her friend's wishes by killing the Witch of the West. Unlike the Wizard, Farquaad was honest as he got the swamp cleared for Shrek as agreed, although he threatened to change his mind.
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(at around 25 mins) After Shrek and Donkey defeat the knights at the tournament Shrek turns to the crowd and says, "Try the veal." This line is part of the line spoken by Sollozo to Captain McClusky when they met with Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Both lines come before a major character undergoes a life-changing moment.
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(at around 1h 22 mins) The line, "God bless us, every one," said by the Gingerbread Man (walking on a crutch) during the song "I'm a Believer," at the ending is originally from Charles Dickens' book, "A Christmas Carol," spoken by Tiny Tim (who also used a crutch). It also ends nearly every movie adaptation of the book.
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(at around 10 mins) William Steig, the writer of Shrek, also wrote a Children's book called "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" In which, a donkey has a magic pebble and, scared of a lion, wishes himself to be a boulder for protection. This is referenced in Shrek in Donkey's famous quote "I like that boulder, that is a nice boulder."
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(at around 14 mins) When the fairytale creatures arrive at Shrek's swamp, you can see Papa Bear comforting Baby Bear at a fire. Later in Lord Farquaad's castle (at around 49 mins), as he watches Fiona on the mirror you see Mama Bear as a rug, skinned and laying on the floor. Her ultimate fate, however, seems to be OK: she re-appears in the Video/DVD Karaoke scene, dancing with Papa and Baby Bears.
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(at around 6 mins) When everyone is lining up with their magical creatures for sale, the woman that has Donkey is voiced by Kathleen Freeman. At one point she says "No! No!" This is said exactly the same in the film The Blues Brothers (1980) where she plays a nun, and Jake offers to get her money to save the orphanage and she says "No! No! I will not take your..."
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Contains a major spoiler — show
The ending where Shrek and Donkey race to Duloc to stop the wedding because Shrek realizes he's in love with Fiona. He stops the wedding and tells Fiona that Lord Farquaad is only trying to marry her to become king and tells her that he loves her. It's related to the scene of another Mike Myers movie Wayne's World 2 (1993) when Bobby was trying to have Cassandra move to Los Angeles to keep her from Wayne so he can have her to himself and he also tried to marry her but Wayne races to the wedding and stops it and Cassandra realizes she loves Wayne and she flees with him.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
(at around 29 mins) When climbing up the fiery mountain to rescue Princess Fiona, Donkey says "My mouth was open and everything" when Donkey thought Shrek passed wind. Eddie Murphy (Donkey) had used the same line in his stand-up comedy movie Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983) when he mentioned "You could fart in your friend's face while watching the game, he don't care..."
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Farquaad sending Shrek to rescue Fiona so he can get his swamp back may be a parody of The Wizard of Oz, since Oz would grant Dorothy and her friends' wishes only by killing the Wicked Witch of the West. Unlike the wizard, Farquaad was honest in clearing the swamp for Shrek as agreed, but threatened to change his mind.
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Near the beginning of the film, fairy tale creatures are captured and "the three bears" are shown in a cage. Later, the father bear and the baby bear are seen crying in the background. This is followed by a scene in which Lord Farquaad is shown resting in bed, with a bearskin rug made from the mother bear in his room.
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Deeper Meaning (12)
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John Lithgow was asked whether or not the adult jokes in the movie would've been too inappropriate for kids, he responds: "No, as long as it's done correctly. One of the things I always loved about British Theater was the Annual Christmas British pantomimes, which are these corny old fairy tales that are put on as musicals. The principal boy is played by a girl and the ugly sisters are played by guys in drag. "Peter Pan" the musical was very much in that tradition. It is a particular tradition developed over centuries, this ability to put on a show for the entire family, where the adults and the children are laughing at the same time, at the same jokes, for completely different reasons. And the adults like it, particularly, because they realize that the kids are oblivious to what's so funny about it. It's a huge, electric moment when these jokes pay off, and that's what "Shrek" is all about. It's very rare. In a way, that's what we were always trying to achieve on "3rd Rock," appealing to lots of different audience constituencies at the same moment."
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Contains a major spoiler — show
(at around 56 mins) The film also foreshadows Fiona's identity as something other than a normal human princess. For instance, at one point the trio walk through a bug-infested field, and Fiona uses a cobweb stretched between two branches to ensnare the bugs. She wraps the web up into a candyfloss-esque snack, which she passes to Shrek to eat. After she does this, she licks her fingers, hinting she shares Shrek's appetite for gross food not usually edible for humans. Later, she says his weed rat recipe is delicious and digs into it.
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(At about 14 minutes) When the fairy-tale creatures arrive at Shrek's swamp, you can see Papa Bear comforting Baby Bear by the fire. Later, in Lord Farquaad's castle (at about 49 minutes), while watching Fiona through the mirror, you see Mama Bear skinned and lying on the floor as a rug. Her ultimate fate looks better, however: she reappears dancing with Papa and Baby Bear in the video/DVD karaoke scene.
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The film's story initially followed a young ogre who hid in a swamp and did not want to scare people. Shrek (essentially a sweet, well-meaning soul) wanted to do good deeds. His greatest dream was to become a knight and rescue beautiful young maidens in distress. In this version of the film, Princess Fiona was voiced by the rather grumpy, sarcastic female comedian Janeane Garofalo. The princess was the one who did not trust people, and Shrek's sweetness, good heart and good nature eventually opened Fiona's eyes and taught her that it is wrong to judge a person by appearance alone. According to Jim Hill Media, "If you asked the people at Dreamworks, they'd probably tell you that Chris Farley's version of Shrek would have been far better than the Michael Myers/Cameron Diaz version that the studio eventually released in May 2001." However, Chris Farley's tragic death in December 1997 had a ripple effect, because he was no longer available to record the rest of his dialogue for the title character of Shrek. Dreamworks had no choice but to throw out everything done up to that point and start the film from scratch. This meant recasting the role. However, Chris's SNL colleague Mike Myers seemed ill-suited to playing a sweet, sincere character, which meant the ogre's role in the film had to be radically rewritten to play to Myers's strengths. This is how the grumpy, emotionally distant version of the film's title character came about. Of course, given that Shrek's title character would now be sarcastic and disgusting, this meant Princess Fiona's role also had to be rewritten. So while Cameron Diaz was hired to play a nicer, gentler version of Fiona, Garofalo suddenly found herself out on the street.
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Contains a major spoiler — show
At around the 56-minute mark, the film also hints that Fiona's identity is something other than that of a normal human princess. For example, at one point the trio is walking through a field infested with insects, and Fiona uses a spider web strung between two branches to trap the bugs. She wraps the web around a candy-like snack and gives it to Shrek to eat. After doing so, she licks her fingers, implying that she shares Shrek's appetite for disgusting foods that humans generally do not eat. She then says a recipe for field mice is delicious and looks into it.
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Career & Awards (16)
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The film reached the $100 million mark after 11 days equaling the time it took Toy Story 2 (1999) and The Lion King (1994) to tie for the fastest animated film to reach the $100 million mark. But it passed the $150 million mark on its 18th day of release, making it the fastest animated film ever to reach that mark! It became the second-biggest animated hit of all time, behind Disney's The Lion King.
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This film was the first winner for the inaugural Best Animated Film category of the Academy Awards 2001, beating out Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001) and Monsters, Inc. (2001). The actual Oscar itself is now on display at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, donated by the recipient, producer Aron Warner.
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In just over four weeks, the film became the best-selling DVD of all-time. With more than 5.5 million DVDs sold to consumers in North America, the big green Ogre surpassed the previous record-holder Gladiator (2000) (which has sold over 5 million units in one year). Retail has purchased a total of 7.3 million Shrek DVDs and DreamWorks had to continue manufacturing new copies in an effort to avoid selling out of the product prior to the Holidays. "This unprecedented rate of sale confirms that the Shrek DVD is sought after by not only the DVD collector, but also by the wide range of Shrek movie fans including families with kids, teenagers, adults and everyone in between," commented Kelley Avery, worldwide head of DreamWorks Home Entertainment.
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In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," making it the first DreamWorks Animation film to earn that honor. It was also the first animated feature film from the 21st century, the first PG rated animated feature film (rest of the animated films in the National Film Registry are either rated G or didn't get rated by MPAA at all), the first non-Disney animated feature film, & the first non-Pixar computer animated feature film to be inducted.
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In 2020 the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," making it the first DreamWorks Animation film to receive that honor. It is also the first feature-length animated film of the 21st century, the first PG-rated animated film (the rest of the animated films in the National Film Registry are either rated G or were never rated by the MPAA), the first non-Disney animated film, and the first non-Pixar computer-animated feature film.
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Life & Family (3)
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- Wikipedia
- IMDb
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