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After what feels like about thirty sequels it's sometimes easy to forget that the original Shrek movie was a breath of fresh air – well, as fresh as you're gonna get in a swamp. It set a template that's informed all kinds of animations since with its mix of kid-delighting gross-out gags, more edgy jokes for the grown-ups and a wholly irreverent attitude that saw it taking pot-shots at a certain movie studio and theme park provider.
Even year later it's still a very funny film for viewers of any age. It's so good, in fact, that your writer, a Scot born and bred, is willing to overlook Mike Myers' dreadful attempt at a Scottish accent.
Is Shrek worth streaming?
It is. Myers' grumpy swamp-dweller is a wonderful comic character, Eddie Murphy as his constantly chattering sidekick Donkey is just on the right side of extremely irritating, and Cameron Diaz is enchanting as Princess Fiona, a royal who's keeping a very big secret. It's packed with almost as many gags as an Airplane! movie and there's a really sweet message about self-acceptance that's delivered rather well without spoiling any of the over-the-top fun. And it has tons of fun mocking fairytale tropes, which it does mercilessly. As Bitch Media says, "turning the fairy-tale genre on its head was a clever, if not totally novel, notion at the time, and Shrek still retains much of its ironic charm 20 years later."
Total Film said that "there's no denying that the monster-as-hero device has 90-odd-minutes worth of entertainment mileage, and the delivery of the story's moral is handled well enough to avoid tweeness". And the Radio Times said: "This animated fantasy comedy from DreamWorks is an irreverent, occasionally scatological fairy tale with state-of-the-art computer-generated images that almost steal a march on Toy Story."
Writing in the UK's Daily Telegraph, novelist Andrew O'Hagan said: "Here is a movie of the times, funny, enjoyable, perfect-looking, and altogether original in a way that might cause us to look again at the meaning of the word." And the London Evening Standard's Andrew Walker said that "Shrek is alive, and with dark, sly and absolutely hilarious irreverence lampooning every once-sacred characteristic of the nursery kingdom." The movie is "a subversive joy."
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