GULLI – THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28 AT 9 P.M. – FILM
The pages of a fairy tale book written in Gothic letters turn before our eyes. This opens with the ritual formula ” Once upon a time “, then continues with the evocation of a princess to be delivered from an evil dragon. It feels like Disney, when these studios scrupulously apply the elementary rules of the fairy tale, Snow White To The Sleeping Beauty.
But in Shrek, everything goes haywire. The beautiful page of the fairy tale is torn. She is grabbed by Shrek, a green ogre who indiscriminately uses it to clean his butt, sitting on his latrine. We are no longer at Disney, but at its most virulent competitor, DreamWorks (co-founded by Steven Spielberg), which here produces a mirrored fairy tale, whose principles are trampled in favor of the second degree and irony.
The idea is that of a huge imaginary bazaar where the creatures imagined by Perrault and Grimm would coexist in an immense reserve. Produced in computer graphics, the animated film by Vicky Jenson and Andrew Adamson can be understood as a metaphor for the ambitions of DreamWorks, eager to seize a universe mummified by Disney and to which it will give a second life.
A new territory
Shrek is not only a petomaniac and vegetarian ogre, he must harbor on his lands Pinocchio, Snow White, the seven dwarfs, Little Red Riding Hood, threatened with exile by the cruel Lord Farquaad, a sadistic character the size of ‘a dwarf who no longer supports these creatures within the confines of his kingdom.
To regain the tranquility and the exclusive enjoyment of his manure pit, Shrek accepts the mission entrusted to him by Lord Farquaad to find him, accompanied by a talkative and neurotic donkey who expresses himself in the phrasing of the ghetto (a detail particularly sensitive in the original version of the film, where the animal is voiced by Eddie Murphy), a princess held captive by a dragon; a princess who burps and practices karate.
Like any fairy tale, however perverted, Shrek has its own hell. The evil in the DreamWorks production does not take the form of a dragon or a wicked wizard but is embodied in the very kingdom of Lord Farquaad, a sort of immense Disneyland whose architecture we also find and where you are photographed at the entrance and must laugh and applaud at the goodwill of the owner.
Crowned with triumphant success in the United States when it was released in 2001 (which will give rise to three other films until 2010), Shrek defines a new territory of animation, in the figurative sense by its technical prowess, and literally by this way of delimiting a new space, a sort of reserve offered to fairy-tale characters who would benefit from a makeover. A territory whose cursed part would now be the magic kingdom of Disney.
Shrek, by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson (EU, 2001, 89 min), Gulli.