The Hero's Journey: An Ogre's Perspective

Shrek (2001), directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, is based on William Steig’s book about a giant green ogre. This computer animated fairy tale is aimed at people of all ages.

The film begins with Shrek reading a fairy tale and suddenly stops when he was getting up to the part when the prince kisses the princes. Shrek, who is a feared character from the start of the book does not believe in love or friendship, therefore does not believe that there is a happy ending at the end of the fairytale.

Throughout this film, we are introduced to many characters that play important roles. Donkey, who is a talkative and slightly bothersome character was just about to get caught by the guards but Shrek stepped up and protected Donkey from harm. In the eyes of Donkey, Shrek was his hero and would forever stay loyal to him. This was depicted when Donkey started to follow Shrek around, even to his own house!

Lord Farquaad is a short and cruel man who is not of royal stock so therefore can’t become a king until he marries a princess.

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When the Magic Mirror showed him various princesses, Lord Farquaad settled on Princess Fiona, a beautiful princess locked up in a high tower, guarded by a terrifying female dragon. Unwilling to perform the rescue himself, Farquaad holds a tournament to discover the knight who will rescue Fiona. Shrek and Donkey arrived at Duloc during the tournament attempting to force Farquaad to remove the Fairy Tale creatures from his swamp.

They managed to defeat the knights in the end, so Farquaad decides to make a deal with Shrek by giving his swamp back to him only after they find Fiona.

On the long journey to save the princess, Shrek and Donkey developed a better relationship with each other as the time went by. When they finally arrived at the tower, they encountered the female dragon. The dragon started to develop feelings for Donkey after he tried to flatter her and tell her how good she was. In the meantime, Shrek was already in the tower trying to get to Princess Fiona. It turned out that Princess Fiona was under a curse that made her turn into a green ogre, just like Shrek when it was twilight. This was revealed when Lord Farquaad and Princess Fiona were getting married. Princess Fiona was ashamed of people knowing that she an ogre as she did not believe that a princess was to have such undesirable features and believed that Lord Farquaad was the one who would be able to break the spell by giving her a kiss. It turned out that Princess Fiona liked Shrek but was ashamed to admit that she liked an ogre. She then had enough courage to reveal the truth, just before she was getting married to Lord Farquaad. After watching the film, I had a strong desire to know what was going to happen next after Shrek and Princess Fiona were together.

The theme ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ was portrayed throughout this film when Princess Fiona surprised Shrek and Donkey with her Kung-Fu skills and also when the dragon turned out to be friendly at the end and managed to help Shrek, Donkey and Fiona to escape. Some other themes were love and courage as Fiona and Shrek found out that they loved each other when Fiona managed to courageously reveal that she too was an ogre.

My overall score for this film would be four out of five as I still believe there could be more improvements in the moral of the story as it was still very vague. I really liked how every character in the film had their own sort of personality and features. It was very exciting to watch as the illustrations were very lifelike and made the whole film very easy to watch without having to stop and go back to hear or see what was happening. I believe this was a very well made film and I am very excited to see what will happen next.