Fracturingly Funny!. Review on Shrek Movie

Though as far as I know it is the first animated children's movie to feature a Leonard Cohen song sung by John Cale, Shrek is particularly interested in tucking its dark corners under a mattress of sunlight. It's a movie premised on bounty-hunting and ethnic cleansing, and it features at least one torture scene-in other words, it's a comedy, and right at home amongst the fairy tales it parodies.

The target minority, as it happens, is fairy tale characters. The undesirables are mostly the more famous story booksters, including some refugees from some of the better known Disney flicks. But what is more disturbing is that when the bounty call goes out, no one hesitates to turn over even trusted companions for hard cash, and that includes Gepetto forking over his former long nosed, wooden ward.

Nothing more perverse was ever perpetrated in Jay Ward's Fractured Fairy Tales...though I suppose Shrek's good burghers could claim they're just following orders from their tyrant, a delusional, vertically challenged nobleman named Lord Farquaad.

So while the film opens with a sun dappled montage of its pot bellied hero, a misanthropic ogre named Shrek, happily bathing in a field swamp and slurping eyeball soup to the strains of Smashmouth's ''All Star,'' it's a pretty callous computer animated world we are in. In Shrek's second scene, he thwarts a nighttime raid on his person by a posse of pitch fork weilding bounty hunters; his principal companion throughout is a sawnoff talking donkey who has narrowly escaped sale by his greedy owner. When the exiles build a refugee camp in Shrek's yard, he gets ticked off. Then he gets Farquaad to agree to remove them if Shrek can rescue the imprisoned Princess Fiona, whom Farquaad wants for his own.

And there is that torture scene, in which the gingerbread man-for whom running as fast as he can proved an inadequate strategy-is pinned to a cookie sheet but defiant in the face of dismembering by Farquaad. Not to mention the Cohen song, which provides startlingly stark accompaniment to one third act sequence. It is enough to put your mind of wicked stepmothers and cannibal witches.

Yet Shrek is funny, and its dark edges, rather than seeming gratuitious, provide emotional weight. Shrek is given voice by Mike Myers, who uses a soft Scottish accent to convey the tubular eared ogre's crustiness and his gentleness. Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, and John Lithgow lend distinctive personalities to Donkey, the princess and Farquaad. The strong sense of character more than makes up for directorial pandering by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, who can not resist pop songs, an homage to professional wrestling and the occasional tired reference.

Most of all, I am favorably inclined toward any film in which the heroes are a pot bellied ogre and a sawn off donkey, and which promotes interspecies romance and a more enlightened understanding of physical beauty. And so, I am favorably inclined toward Shrek, whose release, as far as I am aware, brings the running total of such films to one!