Shrek (2001, Andrew Adamson & Vicky Jenson) 20

Blast From The Past Dept.:

Before I started this blog, I had a website. It only lasted a couple months, during the summer of 2001. I quickly burnt myself out, thinking I could churn out something long (like the review below) on a weekly basis. It didn't help that I wanted to be Jonathan Rosenbaum, either, and it really didn't help that I was quickly turning into a bad parody of Armond White instead. Anyway, after four long reviews and one capsule, I gave up. (On the plus side, the website encouraged me to figure out about thirty years worth of Top Ten lists; hopefully, I'll get those on here soon.)

But now I'm doing this blog. I can't say why the blog would be any different, but it feels more low-key than a full-fledged website. And, hey, when I don't have an entry ready, I got some backups. So, reproduced here with virtually no changes, I present to you: My Second Review Ever.

The $44,000,000 Puppet Show

The Shrek commercials that carpet-bombed the airwaves were the first giveaway. If they're still on by the time you read this, look at them. Look at them carefully. Notice anything? Notice how EVERYTHING IS IN THE CENTER OF THE SCREEN? At first, I was willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt; Pixar created a version of A Bug's Life where they digitally squeezed everything together to fit television's aspect ratio. Perhaps they were doing the same thing here. But then my friend Lauren went to see it after I told her my reservations, and I apparently ruined the experience for her: all she could notice, she said, was that everything was in the middle of the screen. Now I had to see if my hunches were correct, or if I was just making my friends neurotic.

Shrek has quite a few marks against it, primarily due to the script, which sucks. It isn't funny; the only wit it manages is the "have you seen the muffin man?" bit with the paraplegic gingerbread man. It is chock full of cliches, both verbal and visual. The characters aren't even that interesting (I mean, the donkey's name is Donkey). However, what if the script was brilliant? Characters with more than two traits, original jokes, and genuine surprises? Fact is, Shrek would still suck. Why? Because the directors don't know what they're doing.

Shouldn't a computer-animated feature, released in 2001, be better than one released in 1995? Isn't that a reasonable expectation? Of course, it depends on what you mean by "better". From a technical standpoint, Shrek is more advanced than Toy Story. (That's what they say at least; I'm not sure I can tell). But there always exists the possibility of going backwards artistically; and Shrek is as backwards and regressive in its storytelling compared to Toy Story as the medieval ages are to modern day.

In the first ten minutes of Toy Story, we get: swish pans; varied compositions; movement within the frame; off-screen dialogue; interesting lighting (when the toys look out the window at the incoming party guests, the black shadows of the blinds create a beautiful shot); and interesting scale changes (Woody talking to the tiny toy soldiers, then moving down to their vantage point). The most captivating segment is the soldiers' recon mission, as they move from the bedroom down to the first floor, which is told with little dialogue.

In Shrek, we get virtually none of that. Furthermore, every long shot, medium shot, and close-up in the film has its subject placed right in the middle of the screen; it's like the directors have a button for each, and they're calling the camera shots "live", like on TV show. Whenever someone speaks, we cut right to that person, dead center. If another person responds, another cut, dead center. (Antz, another Dreamworks production, had the same problem.) The "camera" (of course, there is no physical camera in computer animation) barely moves, and when it does so, it keeps its subjects dead center. Everything is told through the dialogue; you could listen to this movie on the radio and not miss anything.

Ultimately, Toy Story is told visually, and Shrek is told verbally. Understand: there is nothing inherently wrong with this. It's simply a style, a choice, and there are a number of great films that are told this way; look at any film by John Cassavetes. In fact, there is a precedent for a kind of visual performance that is told through verbal means: the puppet show. Nothing wrong with puppet shows, right?

But when you are using computer animation, and you can show anything you can imagine, from any angle you can imagine, why, but why, would you use puppet show aesthetics? Unfortunately, the answer is simple: because you have a threadbare imagination.

Is that harsh? Look at any still from Shrek. Once you get past the surface beauty of the image, look at the background. There is no sense of life in this world. There are geometric rows of flowers, slick, clean-looking stone castles, and forests that disappear from memory once they've left the screen. Several of the backgrounds look no better than the mattes used in fifties films. One of the big jokes in Shrek is Lord Farquad's castle, which is supposed to remind viewers of Disneyland's antiseptic cleanliness. The hypocrisy of this joke is that everything in the movie is as sterile as the castle. Everything is curiously underpopulated, curiously spacious, and curiously geometric. The cathedral, where the climax takes place, looks more appropriate for a "Quake" death-match. I take back my earlier statement; these aren't puppet show aesthetics, they're video game aesthetics.

Douglas Sirk once said that camera angles are a director's thoughts, and the lighting is his philosophy. I can only surmise that the Shrek directors' responses are "I don't know" and "I don't care." Since it's gotten them this far, I don't expect them to change any time soon.

Where we saw it: film | We deign to rate it: outta 100
Posted by kza at 11:44 AM | Comments (4)