Practical Magic

Grade: A-

            Sometimes wonderment comes in strange packages: here it’s a rotund green ogre named Shrek, voiced by Mike Myers with the Scottish burr of the Fat Bastard, a rapier-quick wit and an endearing insecurity. Shrek reaffirms what the Toy Story movies (and, to a lesser extent, Antz and This Bug’s Life) proved: while computer animation is great entertainment for kids, it can work on an adult level too. With Shrek, DreamWorks takes the genre to a new level, touching the heart as well as the funny bone and even getting in more than a few sly digs at Mousedom.

            In this fractured fairy tale, the irascible, reclusive ogre is beseiged in his swampy lair by cartoon figures like the Three Blind Mice and Pinocchio, who’ve been dispatched by the diminutive Lord Farquaad (voiced by John Lithgow), the pageboy-wearing autocrat of a sterile, Disneyland-like domain where visitors are subjected to oppressive rules and audience reactions dictated by cue cards.  (Farquaad’s an apparent stand-in for Disney head Michael Eisner, former boss of DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg.)  Lord Farquaad needs to marry a princess to become king, so he dispatches Shrek to rescue the fair Fiona (voiced by Cameron Diaz), who’s held captive by a fire-breathing dragon. Shrek’s sidekick is a loquacious, wise-ass donkey inimitably voiced by Eddie Murphy, who brays many of the best lines in a comic performance harkening back to his excellent work in Coming to America and Boomerang.

            The computer animation, by Pacific Data Images (Antz), is so advanced even humanoid figures (such as the princess, a generic beauty vaguely resembling Catherine Zeta-Jones) are quite lifelike. There are countless delightfully inventive touches: a Disney-esque duet between Fiona and a bluebird culminates explosively; an inflated snake is twisted into a balloon-art pet; Shrek extracts a shard of earwax and presses it into service as candle.  Clever nods to pop culture abound: we get the Macarena and breakdancing; Robin Hood and His Merry Men break into a Riverdance; there’s even a Matrix-style frozen-in-air leap.  The characters’ facial expressions are amazingly expressive, and their interactions pitch-perfect.  Though the story is simple enough for a child to follow (maybe even a film critic), there is plenty of adult humor (much of which will sail over the heads of younger viewers), such as double-entendres on Farquaard’s diminutive size and some earthy phrases uttered by the dozing donkey.

            Much more than a light comedy, Shrek is a fable of touching, universal truths.  Updating the traditional tale, it gives Cinderella’s chain a hefty yank; when Fiona sees she’s being rescued by anything but the Prince Charming she dreamed up, she’s disillusioned, but she’s got a secret of her own—her physical perfection isn’t what it seems. Perhaps Shrek’s greatest charm is its tone; it perfectly balances flights of fancy with an engaging story, never becoming preachy or simplistic.

            In the end, Shrek contains more than a little wisdom; it’s as simple as "you can’t judge a book by looking at the cover," and as profound as "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  It's enough to give a ray of hope to the ogres of the world—or anyone who’s ever felt like an ogre.