Looking back on Shrek 20 years later, with its legions of imitators obscuring the view, it’s easy to dismiss the movie as too crass and too catchphrase-y. box office alone and yielding sequels, theme-park attractions, Party City birthday merchandise, video games, spinoffs, memes, and far, far too much green food.
At the time, Shrek’s recipe seemed risky, but all bets paid off big time for its believers the movie became an overnight phenomenon, grossing nearly $500 million at the U.S. In 2001, Shrek ran headfirst in the opposite direction, leaning into Y2K postmodernism, pop-culture references, a precarious blend of arch irony and heart, and a genuinely staggering amount of poop and fart humor. In the years predating Shrek, Disney had reclaimed its mojo by releasing an Oscar-winning slate of now-classics that harkened back to the studio’s groundbreaking fairy-tale-movie formula, spicing up its magic touch with some Broadway-indebted grandeur and polish. After seven decades of Walt Disney Animation more or less colonizing children’s animated cinema (and coming off what was arguably the House of Mouse’s strongest decade yet), DreamWorks stepped in as the new rival studio in town, a scrappy upstart ready to disrupt Disney’s monopoly.ĭreamWorks was an underdog, betting its hopes (and fortunes) on a story about the ultimate underdog: An agoraphobic ogre who becomes a reluctant hero to a hodgepodge of rejected fairy-tale creatures, despite how much the human villagers all hate him and how much he’s internalized their hatred. So much of what we now take for granted as standard family-movie fare was, in 2001, nearly unthinkable - or at the very least, hardly popular - prior to the surprise hit about a big stinky green man and his wise-cracking donkey sidekick. One was a psychosexual exploration of a woman’s unstable, bifurcated identity as it manifests in a fantasy relationship, a searing indictment of the Hollywood dream factory and the promises it peddles the other was Mulholland Drive. In 2001, two classics of 21st-century American cinema premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Photo-Illustration: by Vulture Photo by DreamWorks Pictures Take yourself to Shrek school and see how you do on this pop quiz.
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