When you read a Jane Austen novel, you rarely have to go much further than page 25 to discover which guy the heroine is going to end up married to. You don't keep reading to discover whether things will work out, but because Austen does such a witty job of telling us how things go wrong before allowing them to work out. Invariably, misunderstandings crop up and complications ensue. But part of the pleasure in reading Jane Austen is our ability to see through her plots to the happy endings that await us.

Shrek does not rely on a story designed to keep us on the edge of our seats. It's an Austenian love story with complications that are completely phoney, complications that can be whisked aside the moment it becomes convenient for the director to do so. But even if the outcome is never in doubt, the story itself is worth telling because the characters are so engaging and the animation is a joy to behold.

Shrek (Mike Myers) is an ogre whose swamp is turned into a dumping ground for fairy tale creatures by the evil Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow). Farquaad's rather flimsy motivation for expelling what Shrek calls the "fairy tale things" from the land of Duloc is ostensibly to make his society as homogeneous as possible, but really it's just an excuse for Shrek to take a few potshots at some of the most celebrated creations of Disney Studios. Most of the potshots are witless, but I'll confess that I guffawed every single time Shrek commented on how irritating the songs of most Disney films are.

When Shrek rescues a talking donkey (Eddie Murphy) from some of Farquaad's guards, he acquires a sidekick who not only delivers his (often predictable) comedic lines with impeccable timing, but opens up whole new vistas of puns on the word a-s-s.

The division of comedic labor between Shrek and Donkey is fairly straightforward. Shrek's humor tends to rely on his own inability to find the words that he needs to express himself properly--a plight that most adults will be able to relate to. Donkey, on the other hand, relies on constant wisecracking and an endless series of prat falls. He gets tangled up in a turnstile and goes boom. He is catapulted off a tree and goes boom. After Shrek hurls him into the air and becomes distracted, Donkey goes boom. For what it's worth, the children surrounding me in the theater seemed to think it only got funnier each time Donkey fell. They laughed uncontrollably at his slapstick and uncomprehendingly (I suspect) at his wisecracks.

But even if the humor is formulaic, it is extremely polished and often inspired. When Donkey observes that there's no point in being able to talk if we have to keep secrets, the film seems genuinely to be aware of the fact that it is alluding to the story of the donkey ears that King Midas tries to keep secret. That ancient Greek story of how the things that we try to keep secret have a way of becoming incredibly public is extremely relevant to the humiliating transformation that occurs to Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) on her wedding day in front of hundreds of spectators.

Unfortunately, Shrek is less successful with its other allusions. We have a frozen moment in a martial arts scene that evokes The Matrix for the sake of evoking The Matrix. After Donkey manages to cross a bridge that terrifies him, Shrek says, "That'll do, Donkey, that'll do," simply because we all saw Babe. There's a difference between alluding to something because it's relevant to your story and alluding to it just because you expect the members of your audience to pat themselves on the back for catching the reference. If Shrek stumbles anywhere, it is in its assumption that we're all so shallow as to be grateful for any opportunity to cling to the familiar.

Also irritating is a bizarrely Disneyesque montage that unfolds as we are subjected to a very dull song whose repetition of the joyous word "Hallelujah" is at variance with its dreary tempo and depressing melody. Otherwise, however, the soundtrack is not only energetic and fun, but generally relevant to the development of either the characters or the story. I must confess that the rollicking version of "Then I Saw Her Face" at the end actually had the people around me dancing in their seats. I will not confess that I joined in until someone shows up with actual footage of my participation.

But the main thing the film does with music is to mock the tedious and unlistenable numbers that Disney incorporates into its releases. When Princess Fiona does sonic battle with a songbird that actually explodes--all for the purpose of taking the bird's eggs and frying them up for breakfast--it is nothing short of a brilliant comment on how Disney films always manage to sidestep unpleasantness. And when Shrek and Princess Fiona actually inflate forest creatures into balloons as they frolic towards Duloc, it seems to be an indictment of precisely the kind of sadism that Disney always manages to celebrate without ever quite putting on the screen.

Although Lord Farquaad looks an awful lot like a cross between Buzz Lightyear and Jay Leno, the animation of Shrek is a good deal better than the stuff we're used to from Toy Story. Moreover, I have to give the film points for presenting us with sexually predatory females, a princess who is in quite a hurry for her first kiss and a dragon in search of some donkey-love. And since I have long wondered how one would go about making Robin Hood unlikeable, I'm glad to know that the answer is quite simple: Give him a French accent. Fans of The Princess Bride will be pleased to see an homage to the wedding between Humperdinck and Buttercup, but once again, I'm not quite sure what the purpose of the homage is.

I began by saying that the outcome of Shrek is clear from the outset. By that I mean that the outcome of the love story, of who will end up with whom, is clear. What's not so clear is the meaning of the spell that has been cast on Princess Fiona. When she receives true love's first kiss and assumes her true form, will it be her diurnal or nocturnal form--or something else entirely? And will anything happen to the one who kisses her? That's the question that gives us something to worry about. And the fact that Shrek refuses to answer it in the way that Disney would is what enables me to recommend this film to adults and children alike.



Recommended: Yes