Fill your fairy-tale fantasies with Shrek

Every now and then, one must temporarily retire from a film. Either his family has watched it too much, he has watched it too much, or he’s just plain sick of the movie. In my case, with Shrek, it was the most former. My family, as I’ve said before, tends to like to… overplay things a bit. And Shrek was most definitely overplayed.

So, I decided not to watch it for about two years; maybe three. But recently, my brother decided to overplay it again. And for once, it wasn’t such a bad thing, because I found myself enjoying this nearly faultless five-star wonder of animation in ways I had never before. Such as, when Shrek, the title character, tries to rescue Princess Fiona from her dragon-guarded castle surrounded by boiling/flaming lava. That is a really, really funny sequence, and I had never really known it so well until just the other week. Scenes like that turn a movie into a masterpiece.

While I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that Shrek is a Humphery-Bogart-esque greatest-films-of-all-time type of deal, it will end up being one of the best movies of this decade. This isn’t just in my view; it seems to be in everyone’s, with the constant over-talk the movie is always getting. That tends to be how movies get a good reputation, and Shrek is at least somewhat deserving.

The film’s main strength relies in its sense of humor, and perhaps the voices of the characters provide for that. Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) and Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy) provide for a great team, and their conversations carry the largest portion of the movie’s laughs. Characters such as Fiona (voiced by Cameron Diaz) and Lord Farquaad (voiced by John Lithgow) aren’t always as comically appealing, but their antics and idiosyncrasies can often prove to be, such as when we see Farquaad sitting in his bed watching late-night magic mirror, hairy chest bared and all.

That doesn’t go to forget the film’s mastery of Grimm-esque fairy tale lore. The film catches one immediately in a sequence where all of the fairy tale characters in the world are moved in Shrek’s swamp, which is the moment that sets off the movie’s plot. The writers did a brilliant job coming up with what they come up with… and as Forrest Gump would say, “I guess that’s all I have to say about that.”

Adamson and Jenson, the two directors, directed this quasi-fairy-tale just as well as it needed to be done, and we end up with a film that captures fairy-drama, action, and comedy as well as it needs to be. Shrek will prove to be one of the few films that stands the test of the decade.

Rating: A