Shrek

Shrek wants to be rude about fairy tales, and it is funniest when it remembers to make us like the people behaving badly. Directors Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson put an ogre in the leading role and set about teasing the conventions. We recommend it for the voices and the affection beneath the bad manners. The jokes about other entertainment are a less reliable attraction, especially when recognising the reference is most of the joke.

Mike Myers gives Shrek enough defensiveness to make his dislike of himself matter, without making him tiresome company. Eddie Murphy’s Donkey is the more immediate pleasure: the speed of the chatter suggests another thought has arrived before the previous one has been dealt with. We laughed at Donkey’s verbal persistence, and then found ourselves warming to it. Murphy makes all that talking sound like a need for company, which is more useful than merely giving the comic sidekick extra lines.

Cameron Diaz gives Princess Fiona enough firmness to hold her own against the louder performances, while John Lithgow makes Lord Farquaad’s self-importance enjoyably silly. The cast can make an exchange funny before the script has finished arranging its punchline. Writers Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman and Roger S.H. Schulman do their most satisfying work when they let these personalities irritate each other. Pointing at a familiar fairy-tale convention produces less dependable laughs.

James Hegedus’s production design makes the fairy-tale setting immediately recognisable, which gives the parody a useful start. There is pleasure in the computer animation’s attention to surfaces, though the polish itself is not what makes the characters engaging. Their expressions need to keep pace with the voices, and mostly they do. The visual comedy works because we can follow a reaction as well as hear a gag, without being distracted by the effort involved in making it.

Editor Sim Evan-Jones gives the rapid dialogue room to land; at 90 minutes, the film seldom makes a comic idea serve longer than it should. John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams’s music takes the adventure and the feeling seriously enough to support them. That helps when the jokes make way for the story’s concern with appearances and acceptance. The film needs some straightforward tenderness if its hero’s unhappiness is to mean anything, and the music is willing to supply it.

The crude jokes are uneven, but crudeness is hardly a betrayal of a film with this appetite for bad manners. The more wearing passages are the pop-culture nudges, where the writers seem pleased simply to have noticed something the audience knows. They interrupt the pleasure of spending time with these characters. Nor does mocking a familiar sort of story prevent Shrek from following one, and its sincerity sometimes arrives with more insistence than we need.

For a family fantasy, the useful achievement is that the comedy and the wish to be accepted belong to the same characters, rather than feeling like separate jobs. Adults can enjoy the personalities without waiting for a reference aimed over the children’s heads. The characters give us enough reason to care, even when the film is busy advertising its cleverness. Watch it with someone who claims not to like cartoons, and give Murphy a few minutes.