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Scene 1: "She was waiting in the dragon tower in the top room of the highest tower for her true love first kiss." "She can wait a long time for that. What a bunch of sh ..."
20 years ago this was a challenge: the primitive fairy tale fabrics are flushed down the toilet.
This is how "Shrek - the daredevil hero" begins and makes fun of clichéd Disney films.
For many decades, Disney, with its adaptations of "Snow White" and "Beauty and the Beast", was the sole ruler in the field of animated films and showed a world of exemplary characters.
Lars-Olav Beier, Der Spiegel: "Disney films aimed to turn the children who mostly saw them into well-behaved children, good people. And this film now has a rather anti-social character as the main character. And that was totally refreshing: characters to see who do not behave according to the rules, but just do what they want. "
Shrek makes no secret of his physicality, bathes in the mud and farts.
As one of the first Dreamworks films, it represents the change in animation film - kicked off by Jeffrey Katzenberg, an influential man at Disney.
Until he was kicked out in 1994.
Lars-Olav Beier, Der Spiegel: "One of the reasons was that they had the feeling that it was making something completely different out of Disney. The impulse to make anti-Disney animated films also stems from this. That was certainly not revenge, but me believe that Katzenberg had this idea very early on that something completely different is possible in the animation film sector. "
Scene 2: "Then it must be Lord Faarquad's castle." "This is his hut." "Do you think he's trying to compensate for anything?" "It's so quiet here."
Lars-Olav Beier, Der Spiegel: "That is of course Disney's idea. On the one hand, it is about hygienic purity in the parks. But it is also about moral purity. And that is reflected in Shrek on the one hand there is this completely ordered world. And on the other hand there is the swamp, the wild, the dirty, the dirty. "
Shrek was also groundbreaking through his sophisticated computer animation technique of elements such as water, moving material and the subtleties of the characters.
Lars-Olav Beier, Der Spiegel: "If you look at the film and the fur of the donkey that Eddie Murphy speaks, that's pretty good. This mixture: You have a donkey, but animate it so that you can somehow recognizes the actor in it. That big grin is something that you associate with Murphy's comedy, and you see a hybrid being, so to speak. "
Acting stars like Murphy, Cameron Diaz or Mike Myers also spoke the characters was still unusual at the time.
In return, they were then directly involved in the high grossing results of the surprise success.
And: Shrek had a simple human message - again turning away from the ideal pedagogical behavior in Disney films.
Scene 3: "Onions have layers, ogres have layers just like onions. We both have layers, you see?" "You both have layers, great. But onions are not for everyone. Cakes, everyone loves cakes, and they have layers too!" "I don't care what everyone likes. Ogres aren't like cakes."
Lars-Olav Beier, Der Spiegel: "The princess will be transformed into a green being and be able to live well with it because she has just found a partner. Of course, one can say that the film is a hymn to People of Color. The are green, but ... and are also outsiders. This message is important for children: No matter how I am, I am accepted for who I am. "
Scene 4: "Princess? What happened to you guys, you are somehow different." You mean ugly, don't you? " "Have you eaten anything strange? I warned Shrek when he was serving his weird rat skewer. "
From 2010 the green monster with his funny face became cult on the internet in the form of memes, his name becoming a popular word for ironic nonsense on the internet.
At Dreamworks, the films Madagascar and Kungfu Panda followed, and Disney also expanded its exhibited worldview with the takeover of Pixar in its repertoire - and the moral of the story: Without Shrek there might not be such diversity in today's great animation films.
