On Tuesday morning, the entire internet was talking about Shrek. Well, okay, maybe not the entire internet, but at least a small, Twitter-using corner of it. The Guardian published a twenty-year retrospective on the smash-hit, Cannes-competing animated film by critic Scott Tobias, who declared Shrek “a terrible movie.” This enraged many lovers of the cherished film, each jumping on Tobias’s take as a priggish, missing-the-point, faux-edgy clickbait rant.
Which isn’t really fair. Tobias makes some genuinely interesting points about how Shrek’s massive success (and that of its sequels and spin-offs) paved the way for many other irksome animated films that “pile celebrities into recording booths, feed them committee-polished one-liners and put those lines in the mouths of sassy CGI animals or human-ish residents of the uncanny valley.” Shrek didn’t invent the tradition of one-for-the-grownups animated film humor, but it certainly solidified it as a go-to style, maybe second only to the wistful whimsy of Pixar and its imitators. (In truth, it is much easier to synthesize Shrek’s nudge-nudge gags than Pixar’s carefully managed sentiment, so more films attempt the former.)
I read all this dispassionately. Not because it’s hard to get invested in yet another film Twitter outrage, though, sure, each one hits less and less as time creeps on. But because—shamefully? Proudly? Inertly?—I hadn’t seen Shrek. I’ve seen many clips from it, because they were inescapable for a long time, and because the cable movie channel at my college played the film in rotation for an entire semester. But I had never seen it from start to finish, instead osmosing Shrek lore through the memes and lingos pervasive on the Millennial-dominated internet. When the film came out, I was just about to graduate from high school and could not be bothered to watch some dorky kids movie, even though every review said that Shrek was clever and subversive and totally skewered Disney in an irreverent way. (The villain lives in a theme park and kind of looks like Michael Eisner!)
Ever a diligent, responsible observer of Twitter phenomena, I decided to put off the rest of my work and watch Shrek today. I was curious if I’d side with Tobias or the film’s staunch defenders. My suspicion was the former; Shrek-style attempts at snarky iconoclasm are usually more strenuous than satisfying, and I don’t love jokes about people, or ogres, brushing their teeth with slime or farting. (I like fart jokes, but not when people remark on the smell. The noise is what’s funny, in my useless opinion.)
Anyway! Watching the film, I immediately saw what Tobias took issue with. Shrek is a crass movie, both in comportment and aesthetics. It’s not really Shrek’s fault that computer animation has advanced so much since the film’s release 20 years ago, but even in that era there were movies using similar technologies whose images have better stood the test of time. (You know what almost always ages well? Hand-drawn animation!) Shrek is garish, perhaps by design. It’s unpleasant to look at and to listen to, with Mike Meyers doing his abrasive Scottish burr and Eddie Murphy mugging for the back of the house as Shrek’s loyal companion/annoyance, Donkey.
The humor is stale and strained, its messages about stereotyping and looksism creaky and perhaps too heavily placed on the shoulders of the only female character, Cameron Diaz’s Fiona. (Who is a pretty woman by day, ugly ogre by night—until the end, when she goes full ogre.) All of the movie’s brash kissing-off to beloved fairytale characters may have pleased a certain early 2000s ethos of ironic detachment and rule-breaking. But—as Tobias cogently argues—it plays flippant and almost nihilistic now. Shrek seems a part of the wave of culture that clawed away at earnestness until it was barely alive, and was then rebuilt in the noxious, corporate manner of branded fandom and discourse-averse New Niceness. The movie does feel a little villainous in that way.
Mostly, though, my reaction to Shrek was as dispassionate as it was before I had seen it. The movie is so enshrined in cultural legacy that it’s become fixed and impermeable. Fans who loved it then and love it now are never going to be convinced otherwise; people who were always skeptical gain little from further skepticism at this point. Many of those fans may have been at the right formative age when the movie came out, so their brains grew around it. Mine did the same for myriad movies and TV shows that now seem thin, or riddled with problems, or have become glaring emblems of a bad era in popular culture.
Shrek earns such visceral reactions because it is so precise a marker of its time; it both responded to the mores of the day and helped create them. Which means that assailing it is, in some senses, to assail things much larger—like memory, like lived experience, like youth itself. That doesn’t preclude the film from criticism, certainly; any loved thing from which a contemporary ill can be sourced isn’t free from criticism simply because it is old and revered. But maybe it is better in this particularly instance—or at least more productive—to attack and unpack the particular current ill rather than to boldly relitigate something as ossified and settled and mostly benign as Shrek. (We’re not talking about Gone with the Wind here.)
Which is a long and tortured way of saying that, for someone who has no real relationship with Shrek, the movie is annoying but fine—a curio of a distant age whose now-dated snap really only provokes a little melancholy, a gentle mourning of a lost time somehow both more innocent than and as cynical as today. Shrek does mean a lot more than that to many people, which is their prerogative. So is hating it, for the anti-Shrek contingent. What I hope we can all agree on, though, is that Shrek is objectively bad on one front: all the music is terrible, at least as it’s used in the movie. I’m sorry, Smash Mouth, but someone had to say it.
All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
— A First Look at Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon
— 15 Summer Movies Worth Returning to Theaters For
— Why Evan Peters Needed a Hug After His Big Mare of Easttown Scene
— Shadow and Bone Creators Break Down Those Big Book Changes
— The Particular Bravery of Elliot Page’s Oprah Interview
— Inside the Collapse of the Golden Globes
— Watch Justin Theroux Break Down His Career
— For the Love of Real Housewives: An Obsession That Never Quits
— From the Archive: The Sky’s the Limit for Leonardo DiCaprio
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.