Green ogre rips Disney to shreds

10 April 2012

A proud little bluebird trills along with Princess Fiona in a duet to express its joy in the morning.

Then, over-reaching itself on a high note, it implodes in a cloud of azure feathers: its eggs fetch up in the frying pan. A gingerbread man is "tortured" by having his solvent limbs dunked in milk. A magic mirror on the wall hesitates about declaring its owner the handsomest prince of all - until encouraged by another looking glass having its face smashed. And a bulbous green ogre, with conical ears and enough wax in them to make candles, performing morning ablutions in the privy, rips a page out of the venerable tome that has prefaced many a Disney fairy tale, and reaches behind him.

Shrek is alive, and with dark, sly and absolutely hilarious irreverence lampooning every once-sacred characteristic of the nursery kingdom. Shrek is a subversive joy. I've seen it twice: the jokes, allusions and sub-textual send-up of the Disney empire fill every wicked, Mickey Mouse-taking minute. Animated entirely by digital wizardry - not a hand-drawn line - it achieves effects that encroach on reality yet remain in imagination.

Eddie Murphy, for instance, voices a talking donkey, a smart-ass refugee from the ethnic cleansing of fairyland ordered by despotic Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) who dumps the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Pinocchio, the Old Lady evicted with her brood from her Shoe and dozens more on Shrek's swampland doorstep. Every hair on Murphy's hide bristles with tactile verisimilitude; every joint from jaw to rump twitches anatomically in line with his comically nervy spiel. Likewise, every bright ringlet on Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), the liquefaction flow of her velvet robe, even her skin tones have the feel of organic root, thread or cell.

We're approaching an era when computers will simulate live actors - the new race of the "synthespians" - with such fidelity that we won't tell the difference. Yet, with all this cutting-edge artistry, the industrial light show directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson doesn't dispel Shrek's magic. Even when it breaks fairy-story conventions - all the time - it does so affectionately. It's transgressive, but still transports you with wonder.

Its most post-modern update is perhaps the magic mirror of Snow White's malicious stepmother that offers Lord Farquaad the multiple choice of brides as if it were a TV dating show. The film has a hidden agenda, too. Some see it as payback time by Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the DreamWorks triumvirate who produced it and a former Disney executive allegedly called "a little midget" by his ex-boss, Michael Eisner.

The magic kingdom of Lord Farquaad, who bears a passing likeness to Eisner, is a repressively sanitised enclave: its boss first appears as a giant shadow that gradually shrinks to diminutive status as he enters his throne room. But this insider trading of insults in no way diminishes Shrek's generation-wide appeal or its continuous vocal and visual inventiveness.

The uncouth but kind-hearted ogre, voiced in ripe Scots tones by Mike Myers, sets off with Eddie's gabby mule to rescue Princess Fiona from her dragon-guarded castle as a trade-off for the fairy-tale folk being allowed to go back to their storybook homeland. Their adventures en route parody all-action movies and even stretch to a delicious take-off of the Hidden Dragon style when the Princess's fighting mode fells Robin Hood and all his Merry Men.

The rolling fireball that ritually encroaches on human heroes in almost every blockbuster these days gains a factory-freshness when it's breathed out of a dragon's nostrils. The princess has her secret, too, which it would be unfair to reveal. But it reverses the romantic decree that fairy-tale heroines must be slender beauties and marry handsome sprigs of royalty. Shrek ends with a wedding all right. But the bride's beauty is in the eye of the suitor and her spouse is comfortable in his monster skin.

It's this openness of approach to age-old conventions that finally distinguishes Shrek from the tight-laced tales Disney's much-loved cartoons have purveyed to generations. There's still a warm place in my heart for Dumbo, Snow White, Pinocchio and the rest of the line-and-wash creations. But Shrek excites and amuses me no end. It makes me marvel. It removes old fables and unpacks and assembles them in a new form. It delights without destroying. It's another world, adult in style and content, but a parallel universe with childhood. Don't miss.

Shrek
Cert: U

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