Shrek 2 (Andrew Adamson, 2004)
Every so often, when the accolades and box office seem to overrate the merits of a film, I find myself suffering a backlash against a movie despite having liked it. For example, Dreamworks / PDI’s original Shrek was a slick, fast, funny film, and I enjoyed it immensely, but from some of the reviews of it, you’d think nobody had made a send-up of fairy tales or Disney movies before. Shrek was, of course, far from the first such movie: it is the latest in a very long counter-Disney tradition that goes back at least to Tex Avery. And despite the reflexive assumption that the Disney studio could never make such a film, it came only the year after Disney’s manic The Emperor’s New Groove, a film I think is superior as a straight-out comedy. Indeed, there are many recent animated films I would rate above Shrek: the aforementioned Groove, most of Pixar’s films, The Iron Giant, even PDI’s earlier film Antz.
Since I am not completely sold on the brilliance of the whole revisionist fairytale routine, I think it’s something of a shame that the success of Shrek guaranteed a sequel. I would prefer to see these artists striking out and trying something different. The Dreamworks / PDI studio has already been dogged by suspicions that they were deliberately shadowing Pixar’s subject matter (after the similarly themed Antz and A Bug’s Life, and the upcoming A Shark’s Tale following Finding Nemo). With Shrek 2 they are instead chasing their own tail. Pixar, of course, made a sequel work wonderfully (with Toy Story 2), but that film had a strong ensemble of characters to work with. The original Shrek largely exhausted the potential of its central trio when it paired off Shrek and Fiona. So it is perhaps predictable that Shrek 2 brings many new characters into the mix. Shrek and Fiona travel to the land of Far, Far, Away so that Shrek can meet Fiona’s parents (voiced by John Cleese and Julie Andrews), where they also run into the maternal but sinister Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders) and the feline assassin Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas).
The writing is, once again, sharp and witty. Plotwise, this is a reasonable direction to take the characters in, and the film is nearly as funny as its predecessor, even if it sometimes settles for the most obvious gags rather than digging deeper for more genuine satire. (There is whiff of indecision, for example, about making Far, Far Away a caricature of Los Angeles but giving it a British-accented monarchy). Of the new characters, Banderas’ Puss in Boots is far and away the best. Eddie Murphy’s Donkey complains that the position of annoying talking animal is already taken, and the joke has teeth, because the character of Donkey – always an intrinsically irritating character, saved only by good writing – is shunted sideways by the new addition to the cast. Saunders’ fairy godmother is also very successful, although she has to survive an awkward musical number at her introduction that was presumably meant as a parody, but isn’t funny or clever enough to succeed.
With so many new supporting human characters, I was more conscious of a flaw that had been only a minor problem in the original film: the stiffness of the animation. Shrek himself is a broadly cartoonish character in his design, and in both films he has been the most successfully animated (with Donkey a close second). In the treatment of the human characters, however, Adamson’s team has ventured much further towards photorealism than their rivals at Pixar have, and I’m not convinced it’s the right way to go. The human characters are much more central here (and much more realistic than the original’s comically diminutive Farquad was), and their awkwardly photorealistic Barbie-Doll appearance is somewhat off-putting. Adamson doesn’t seem to know how – or has forgotton – how to animate these highly realistic characters for comic effect. Watching John Cleese’s King, I found the mismatch between Cleese’s manic vocal performance and the subdued animation disconcerting. There’s very little that’s funny about the way the human characters move: the kind of comic performance found in the Pixar films gives way to a bland realism that feels like it was achieved through motion-capture. It gets worse halfway through when a spell turns Shrek into an unappealing human facsimile of himself. The problem isn’t purely limited to human characters, either. After a promising first scene the animation of Puss In Boots descends into a furry anthropomorphism that doesn’t do anything interesting with the character’s half-cat, half-human nature.
Perhaps I would be more forgiving of the failings of Shrek 2 as a cartoon if traditional animation were still thriving. The death of studio-produced traditional theatrical animation is one of the great cultural losses of the last few years. Compensating for this loss isn’t a burden that Shrek 2 should reasonably have to bear, but – however unfairly – I can’t help but be disappointed that the film forsakes the artistry of animation. Shrek 2 has many pleasures, but they are mostly pleasures of writing. It is all too easy to imagine a CGI Shrek starring in a live-action version of this movie alongside the real John Cleese and Julie Andrews, and the whole package working better.