Not Kids’ Stuff

Hollywood in-jokes still proliferate in the latest movie to star the green ogre.PABLO LOBATO

At a recent preview screening of “Shrek the Third,” I was settling into my seat, enjoying the good sight lines (nothing but pipsqueaks between me and the screen) and the excited anticipation of the children, when a little voice behind me said, “Have to turn off my cell phone now.” The child, a girl, couldn’t have been more than seven. Was she kidding? Alas, she wasn’t. Even in this culture, seven is too early for irony. Then, as the movie began, I realized that a child with a cell phone represents what DreamWorks Animation, the producer of this most lucrative of franchise animated features, envisions its audience to be—tiny, pre-corporate techies who live far from the fairy-tale emotion of enchantment. “The Chronicles of Narnia” and the “Harry Potter” series have discovered their own kind of wonder, but the gang at DreamWorks assumes that its audience lives in an unillusioned media world.

But there’s a mystery here. Did the girl’s parents read to her from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen? Has she seen “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” or any of the other drippy-beautiful Disney animated features, with their butterflies and wondrous glades and shimmering harp glissandos? DreamWorks must assume that she has, and has no tender feelings for them, because the “Shrek” movies are filled with parodies of the old, honeyed Disney style. The parents may get more of the jokes than the children do, but the kids are being fed non-stop satirical hobbledehoydom, in which past and present, Gothic dungeons and Valley Girl talk, are all jumbled together. The “Shrek” phenomenon is one of those seeming oddities in our culture—children being entertained with derision before they’ve been ravished by awe. Maybe seven isn’t too early for irony after all. “Shrek” is postmodernism for towheads, pastiche for the potty-trained.

Once upon a time, the most wonderful of all children’s authors, William Steig, brought out, at the age of eighty-three, a book that became the book in many families, including mine, where the boys relished its snarly splendor. “Shrek!,” published in 1990, is about a creature—warty, lousy, gap-toothed, noisome, and green—who is utterly self-confident. Shrek is so blind to beauty that he’s invulnerable. Nothing scares him, except his sweaty bad dream of being loved by children, but he scares everyone else. He has magical powers—his noxious fumes, which cause flowers and dragons to wilt. For all its acrid temper, “Shrek!” was very much a charmed fairy tale: the perfectly ugly creature finds his perfectly ugly mate. “And they lived horribly ever after.”

The Shrek that DreamWorks designed is a much more benign figure. He is smooth rather than lumpy, ugly-cute rather than ugly-scary. (His beloved, named Princess Fiona in the movies, is ugly-cute, too. She looks like Miss Piggy.) Shrek lost the knob on the top of his head, which now narrows above the eyes, giving him a look of permanent anxiety. In the first movie, which came out in 2001, Mike Myers, as the voice of Shrek, gave him a foul temper. Shrek didn’t want to play the hero; he just wanted to regain exclusive title to his beloved swamp, where, in a dastardly resettlement scheme, the evil Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) had dumped all the disused fairy-tale creatures from old Disney movies. Shrek set out to rescue Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) from a dragon as part of a real-estate deal with Farquaad, in which he would get back his muddy front yard in return for the girl. But, when Fiona turned out to really be as ugly as Shrek, he found a wife. In “Shrek 2” (2004), Shrek and Fiona, happily ogred, pass up the temptations of beauty and retain their natural dark-lime hue. The message of the first two movies was that you have to be yourself, an idea that came off, in this context, as the kind of mass-marketed individualism that induces teen-agers to buy cutoff jeans. It was very different from Steig’s mood of defiant self-sufficiency.

It’s not a big surprise that the material was unnecessarily softened, or that DreamWorks dropped Steig’s merry Yiddishkeit_._ (In the book, Shrek runs into a witch chanting “Otchky-potchky,” which sounds like a street game Steig might have learned growing up in the Bronx.) What was put in place of Steig’s special flavor was the acidity of corporate competition—DreamWorks’ rivalry with Disney for the animation market. As many people pointed out at the time, the figure of Farquaad, who was stumpy and egotistical, may have been a swipe at Michael Eisner, who was then Disney’s chairman and the former boss of Jeffrey Katzenberg, a DreamWorks partner. And the movie’s strategy of teasing old Disney characters may have derived, in part, from a dispute going back to 1994, when Katzenberg left Disney and Eisner refused to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars he felt were due him. The “Shrek” movies are funny, but the wised-up style of the comedy—the Hollywood put-ons and inside gags—has sour roots, and, after a while, the industry jokiness becomes a little nauseating.

In “Shrek the Third,” which was directed by Chris Miller, Fiona’s father, the frog king, is dying, and he tells Shrek (Myers) that he must now be ruler of Far, Far Away, the land in which they all live. Since this is the last thing Shrek wants, he goes on a quest for a substitute—Fiona’s cousin Arthur (Justin Timberlake), known as Artie, who is a student at Worcestershire Academy, a kind of medieval Burbank High, in which snarky kids in jerkins smoke frankincense and myrrh. The plot material isn’t as strong as in the first two movies—if anything, it feels a bit desperate—but the anti-Disney joke blunderbuss remains in good working order: the movie takes several shots at Disney’s recent forays into melodious Broadway kitsch. Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas, who sparked “Shrek” and “Shrek 2,” as, respectively, Donkey and Puss in Boots, are used less centrally than before, but Rupert Everett, so snide that he has become uncastable as anything but a voice, is quite splendid as the arch-loser, Prince Charming. Everett is in touch with the spirit, though perhaps not the body, of William Steig’s incomparable creation.

The characters in the “Shrek” series may resemble rubber bathtub toys, but DreamWorks’ computer-generated imagery, with its three-dimensional look, gives them shadows and weight as they fling themselves hither and yon into distant castle-strewn perspectives. By contrast, the brilliant “Paprika,” directed by Satoshi Kon—a masterly example of Japanese anime, intended for adults—is partly hand drawn, and features multiple areas of visual activity layered at different distances from the picture plane. Set in a business world of long white corridors and glass walls and research labs, it’s a Freudian-Jungian-Felliniesque sci-fi thriller, and an outright challenge to American viewers, who may, in the face of its whirligig complexity, feel almost pea-brained. Paprika, the heroine, is an eighteen-year-old sprite—a kind of sexy Japanese Tinker Bell—who enters people’s dreams as a form of therapy. She explains to one of her patients, a detective haunted by a murder he was unable to prevent, that the first dreams we have when we fall asleep are like arty short films and longer dreams are like blockbusters. In “Paprika,” this connection between dreams and movies is worked to a fare-thee-well, but there are other levels of representation, too—Internet sites, which characters enter bodily, and, appearing now and then, a kind of collective unconscious, in which a parade of toys and icons (including the Statue of Liberty) march through an enormous city with a menacing, throbbing insistence that borders on the fascistic. All of Japanese pop is there. For Japanese traditionalists, the parade must be a true nightmare.

Paprika, it turns out, has a Clark Kent-like double, Dr. Chiba, a beautiful research scientist, who works at a company that has developed a machine—the DC-MINI—that also enters dreams. Human beings, it seems, will go mad if they don’t dream, but “Paprika” is about people whose dreams have been maddened: one of the DC-MINI prototypes has been copped by an evil genius who wants to possess everyone’s inner life and is mucking around with the sleep of Chiba’s colleagues. As Paprika and Chiba enter the dreams—which are fleshed out with familiar images that become increasingly threatening—they undergo wild adventures: terrifying, violent, and sometimes sexual. “Paprika” asks, “Who shall control our dreams?,” which, given this film’s take on the cinematic nature of the unconscious, is really asking, “Who shall control the movies?” Paprika’s detective friend also feels guilty because he once betrayed a fellow-student who was a filmmaker. When he saves Paprika from death, and she, in turn, cures him of his guilt, he is free, for the first time in years, to go to the movies. After some of the most outrageous leaps ever conjoined in a single film, “Paprika” comes to rest with the simple act of a man buying a ticket. Amen. ♦