'Let's do that again!': How to reboot Shrek in 2018

Fig. 1 - Shrek (2001).

Fig. 1 - Shrek (2001).

Back in Nov, Variety caused a furore online by reporting that Chris Meledandri, the Illumination founder and Despicable Me (2010) producer charged with overseeing DreamWorks Animation after its acquisition by Comcast, was planning on 'rebooting' the Shrek series. 'Reboot' typically refers to starting from scratch with a film franchise, recasting the characters and restarting the narrative. If Multifariousness had read their own interview, they would accept noticed that Meledandri actually said that 'while you certainly could make a case for a complete reinvention, I find myself responding to my own cornball feelings of wanting to go back to those characterizations'. What he is in fact describing is a fourth sequel to the 2001 original, implicitly continuing the story from where information technology left off with Shrek Forever After in 2010. William Proctor distinguishes the reboot from the sequel by noting that "a reboot wipes the slate clean and begins the story again from "twelvemonth one," from a indicate of origin and from an alternative parallel position" (2012: five). This would certainly not be impossible to accomplish while retaining the same cast, merely information technology would certainly be counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, other outlets ran with the 'reboot' headline, sending the likes Twitter and YouTube into a frenzy of ogre fans complaining that it'south 'too soon' for a reboot and demanding a sequel instead. This speaks to the amore that people of a sure age have for the era-defining original, perhaps indicating that, commercially, the fourth dimension is indeed right for a new entry in the series to capitalise on this coalescing nostalgia, like to Pixar'south strategy with the decade-long gaps between Toy Story (1995-2010), Monsters, Inc. (2001-2003), Finding Nemo (2003-2016) and Incredibles (2004-2018) sequels.

Regardless of whether DreamWorks and Meledandri become alee with a sequel or even a reboot, yet, the more pertinent question is what purpose would a Shrek moving-picture show serve in the 2020s? Other than fuelling the obsessions of the core of online meme-artists keeping the ogre'south spirit alive through their warped takes on his legend (we'll get to them in a moment), what gap in the marketplace would this once-vital franchise be designed to fill? When the original Shrek debuted, memorably wiping his backside with a page torn from a generic Disney-esque fairy story, he represented a necessary antidote to the enormous commercial success and subsequent market place saturation of the Mouse House's 'Renaissance' run of animated fantasy musicals (Fig. i). With the addition of modern engineering and cultural touchstones to its Medieval diegesis, Shrek challenged the hostage and optimistic fantasy utopia of the Disney canon – long-since established as the default setting of the animated characteristic – by anchoring its fairy-story to our lived reality and gimmicky outlooks. Not only adopting the fresh 3-dimensional aesthetic pioneered in Toy Story (1995) half dozen years earlier, simply marrying it with a sardonic tone, pop-civilization-infused intertextual gags, and explicit criticisms of Disney's approach to fairy-tale adaptation, Shrek was a breath of fresh air for many upon release. Movie critics[1] and academics akin[two] acknowledged the pic as a clear and firm retort to Disney's market dominance and the perceived 'sterility' and 'saccharinity' of their output, as identified by respondents in Janet Wasko et al's Global Disney Audiences Project (run across Phillips 2001: 47).

Shrek was hugely influential, as evidenced past the degree to which subsequent computer-animated films adopted its tone and intertextual approach: in addition to much of DreamWorks' own output, Blue Sky's Robots (2005), Sony'due south Surf's Up (2007), Pixar'due south Cars (2006) and even Disney's Craven Fiddling (2005) owe debts to the ogre, to say nothing of smaller productions like Hoodwinked (2005) and Happily North'Ever Afterwards (2007) which similarly sought to lampoon fairy-tales. Neither approach the targeted specificity of Shrek's parody, however – Happily is a watered downward, toothless gesture towards subverting the Disney model, while Hoodwinked avoids tackling the Mouse Firm, taking aim at Red Riding Hood – perhaps speaking to the comprehensiveness of Shrek's satire.  Its influence was and then pervasive, in fact, that whatsoever sequel or reboot taking the aforementioned approach could never hope to replicate the original's bear upon in an blithe landscape which is yet displaying traces of its aftereffects. This can be seen in the Shrek franchise itself, which abandoned the Disney satire subsequently Shrek 2 (2004) to focus on the ogre's seemingly-endless string of midlife crises, retaining the tone and dense intertextuality of the earlier films but operating less and less parodically.

Fig. 2 - Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018).

Fig. 2 - Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018).

It seems that Disney themselves, though they accept returned to the fairy-tale musical mode that dominated their 1990s slate, cannot release a flick featuring princesses that does non exit of its style to pass commentary on the familiar Renaissance-era tropes that Shrek fabricated well-nigh untenable through its pointed parody. Frozen (2013), for instance, takes great pains to point out that the dear-at-first-sight narrative found in films like Aladdin (1992) and The Trivial Mermaid (1989) is more than a lilliputian unrealistic. Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018), meanwhile, throws all of the Disney Princesses together for the first fourth dimension in social club to run through a laundry list of clichés – bursting into song, getting kidnapped and expletive, talking to animals, relying on a 'large strong man' – all of which were deconstructed nearly two decades earlier in Shrek, and much more acerbically at that (Fig. 2). In a world where fifty-fifty the virtually saccharine Disney musicals are cartoon attention to the tropes of the past, is there any sense in a Shrek reboot to mock a genre which at present subsists on gently mocking itself? Is the big green ogre really the hero we need right now?

The respond is about certainly no – at least inside the framework of a big-budget DreamWorks production. However, extracted from his original context by the aforementioned online memesters, and reduced to a green, ogre-shaped signifier of the time-locked early on-2000s version of postmodern chaos that he once represented, Shrek has again become a destructive effigy of sorts. I've written previously on the trend of ofttimes-unsettling fan content based on the motion-picture show, its Boom Mouth theme song, and its ubiquitous star, but these are always short form works designed for quick laughs or shocks. Coincidentally, nevertheless, in the month following the news of the 'reboot', ii very different large-calibration reworkings of the film debuted, making the case that the only reboot that can replicate the spirit of the original is one filtered through the peculiar lens of online irony perpetuated by Millennials raised every bit much on Shrek'due south cynicism and chaotic bricolage as they were on Disney's trademark sentimentality. These oversupply-sourced reinterpretations make information technology their mission to out-Shrek, or possibly re-Shrek, Shrek, subjecting the original motion-picture show to its own strategies of subversion until it is reduced to an unrecognisable abstraction of itself, anchored only past blurred glimpses of a lime-green silhouette and an impression of an impression of a Scottish emphasis.

Fig. 3 - Shrek Retold (2018).

Fig. 3 - Shrek Retold (2018).

The commencement of these was Shrek Retold, a feature length remake of Shrek perpetrated past the organisers of Wisconsin's annual 'Shrekfest' – described by The AV Club every bit 'where irony goes to dice' – along with 200 collaborators sourced from the funniest, weirdest and darkest corners of the web. The original film was cutting upward into tiny chunks, ranging from total scenes to five-second snippets, handed out to a horde of cyberspace luminaries to recreate in any way they saw fit, and ultimately reassembled into an almost-coherent narrative (Fig. 3). Similar projects accept been mounted by other online fan communities, with 2009's Star Wars: Uncut projection being perhaps the almost well-known. While the Star Wars fans certainly took liberties with the source material and establish sense of humour in their low-budget recreations of it, it is clear that their infatuation with the text is more hostage than that of the Shrek fans, every bit Uncut mostly lacks the palpable layers of irony and wilful surrealism found in Retold. The latter'south segments range from genuinely beautiful blithe sequences and music videos – Hot Dad'south '80s inspired have on 'I'm A Believer' is a sublime standout – to horrific miscarriages of CGI and baffling outsider art. Just try making sense of LA busker David Liebe Hart's boob-assisted encompass of John Cale's comprehend of 'Hallelujah', for example. Though it'due south often difficult to tell, the majority of contributions seem to come from a place of existent affection for the movie. The contributors are past-and-big fans of the film, admitting fans seemingly competing to produce the nigh agonizing or consciously ironic accept on the film. And nonetheless, Shrek isn't strictly parodied per se, in the way that it parodied Disney classics itself. It isn't dissected or criticised so much as it is re-presented, and the sense of humour comes from the diverseness and absurdity of those re-presentations, paralleling and amplifying the perceived absurdity of the original.

Taking place around the release of Shrek Retold past pure happenstance, the organisers of Flim Nite, a Manchester-based comedy and functioning art result which stages shows based effectually loose reinterpretations of classic movies, embarked on a bout dedicated to Shrek itself. Similarly to Retold, Flim Nite typically carves a film into four sections, and tasks four artists with building a functioning around each of them. Unlike Retold, this approach rarely if ever results in a coherent remake of the motion-picture show in question, as the artists are free to develop any kind of set they like, focussing on whatever minutia from their assigned section which takes their fancy. Some performers tour with the organisers, and some are exclusive to a particular town. The Newcastle consequence, for instance, featured a Dickensian miser critiquing the flick on ludicrous economic grounds, a monologue delivered from the perspective of Ass'due south backside, a philosophical discussion based around every question asked in the moving-picture show, and a participatory theatre experience centred around a mass-possession taking place during a 2001 screening of Shrek. The Flim Nite performers were more liable than the Retold contributors to openly ridicule the moving-picture show, pointing out its flaws and absurdities more than explicitly, and the organisers are by their own admission far from Shrek super-fans. Nevertheless, in that location were more a few diehards in the audience, whooping at every obscure reference, the more specific the better. The evening had a celebratory temper, and featured giddy sing-alongs of 'All Star' and 'Hallelujah'.

Both of these fan-produced 'reboots' of Shrek distort its imagery, narrative and music into baroque, frequently horrifying visions, and yet they do so without malice. The takeaway is that Shrek has taught us to laugh at Shrek, refracting it through its ain postmodern sensibility. Unauthorised, and unsuitable for children, though they may be, they represent a truer accommodation of the original film's cultural role – dismantling and reassembling the seminal works of the by to reveal their absurdities – than an official reboot could peradventure aspire to. It is worth noting that these and other subversive fan responses to Shrek coincide with the renewed viability of the blithe fantasy fairy-tale in the form of Frozen and Moana (2016), mayhap signalling that every bit the film has go more widely known every bit a punchline than anything else the force of its initial impact on popular culture has been forgotten. Still, if such fan works can exist defendant of diluting Shrek's legacy as a landmark in the history of fantasy animation, their attitude and strategies signal the lasting influence of its spirit.

Notes

[ane] See Susan Wloszczyna, '"Shrek" spins jokes from fairy tales', USA Today (18 May 2001) <https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/enter/movies/2001-05-16-shrek-review.htm> [accessed 9 September 2017]; Ed Gonzalez, 'Shrek', Camber (thirteen May 2001) <http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/shrek> [accessed 9 September 2017]; Elvis Mitchell, 'And then Happily Ever Afterward, Beauty and the Beasts', The New York Times (16 May 2001) <http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F00E3DD153AF935A25756C0A9679C8B63> [accessed nine September 2017].

[two] See M. Keith Booker, Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010); Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Lexington: Academy Press of Kentucky, 2002).

References

Phillips, Mark. "The Global Disney Audiences Project: Disney across Cultures," in Dazzled By Disney?: The Global Disney Audiences Project, eds. Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips and Eileen R. Meehan (London: Leicester Academy Press, 2001), 31-61.

Proctor, William. "Regeneration & Rebirth: Anatomy of the Franchise Reboot," Scope, Issue 22 (Feb 2012): ane-xix.

Biography

Sam Summers is Associate Lecturer in Motion-picture show at Liverpool Promise University. His research focuses on the utilize of intertextual references in contemporary blitheness in general and DreamWorks' blitheness in particular, with a view to contextualizing and historicizing the studio'south role in the development of the medium. He is the co-editor (with Noel Brownish and Susan Smith) of Toy Story:How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature (London: Bloomsbury Bookish,2018), and has a forthcoming monograph on the DreamWorks Animation studio.