The original Shrek was a huge box office success. The film also made a lot of critics’ top ten lists (always in position nine or ten though) as they rewarded the filmmakers for their visually pleasing style of animation and their humorously off-kilter take on the fairy tale. Shrek was good, true, but it also stopped well short of reaching its potential. The first half of the movie was crisp, laugh-out-loud funny and very original. Sadly, for all its ingrained Disney-bashing, the latter half of Shrek seemed to emulate the most hackneyed movie from the Mouse House with its message booming through that looks are fine, but it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Realizing which elements of the original worked and which elements struck people as repetitive and heavy-handed, the Shrek filmmakers went back to the drawing board and created a work in Shrek 2 that outshines the original in every conceivable fashion. It’s been a long time since I’ve had as good a time at a movie as I did at Shrek 2.

Mike Myers returns here as the voice of the giant, green ogre, Shrek. Married at the end of the first film, Shrek and his wife, Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) are still, quite literally, in the honeymoon stages of their relationship. Having never met Fiona’s parents, the king and queen of a country (called) Far, Far Away, Shrek, Fiona and Donkey (Eddie Murphy) clamber into a stagecoach and head to a place truly far, far away. Upon arriving, the newlyweds learn that the aptly named Prince Charming has his sights set upon Fiona with the blessing of her parents, marriage to Shrek be damned. After all, who could ever truly love an ogre?

Dreamworks’ animation department has always been edgier and willing to take more risks than Disney or Fox’s animation arms. The result is a funnier, wittier product than audiences are used to seeing.

There is a common misconception about both Shrek and its sequel that the movies are aimed squarely at kids. Not all animation is simply for the younger demographic groups. There are numerous jokes in Shrek 2 that will fly well above the heads of children under the age of fifteen. After one of Far, Far Away’s coffee shops, Farbucks Coffee, is destroyed by the (Stay-Puft) Gingerbread Man, the caffeine addled clientele run across the street to another Farbucks Coffee shop. My favorite joke in the film came during a parody of Cops called Knights. Having chased down Puss-in-Boots, the knights frisk him and find a bag of catnip on him (an obvious stand in for a dime bag of marijuana). "It’s not mine," Puss-in-Boots insists as he’s being led away.

Since the advent of the big-budget sequel, studios have been trying to find some kind of fail-safe formula to ensure that the second film in a given series generates a bigger box office take than the first. It would appear that no one really considered making the second film of a higher quality than the first. Shaking off the temptation to simply remake the first film, ala Austin Powers and Scream, Shrek 2’s trio of directors, Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon got it very, very right on Shrek 2.

chris neumer

yes, it's true: The late Chris Farley was originally cast as Shrek and actually recorded his dialogue for the first film prior to his death.