Shrek

The new film "Shrek" opens with four magical words —"Once upon a time" — spoken in a warm baritone, which then narrates a lavishly illustrated storybook. As he lands on the words "happily ever after," our title character — green, hulking, irate — makes his entrance.

"Like that would ever happen!" he snarls. Then he rips a page from said lavishly illustrated storybook, and two seconds later emerges from an outhouse, looking refreshed and ready to start the day.

From there on, it's a merry game of quote-and-destroy for our favorite children's stories. "Shrek" stays true to the spirit of fairy tales, as it eventually settles into a predictable plot and warm, old messages, but sends up their trappings with irreverent glee. The result is a film fit for both children who enjoy fairy tales and adults who still enjoy them, but are loath to be reminded of it.

In its outlines, our story is familiar. Our hero does indeed meet a talking animal and brave the wrath of a terrible dragon to save a beautiful, imprisoned princess, all within an animated fantasyland. However, our hero is not a noble knight but the local ogre, with that infelicitous name of Shrek (voiced, in a "Canadian-Scottish" accent, by Mike Myers). The animal is no mighty stallion but an overly talkative donkey named, well, Donkey (an energetic Eddie Murphy). And they're going to save Princess Fiona (peppy Cameron Diaz) not because of that fairy-tale categorical imperative, true love, but because Lord Farquaar (John Lithgow) has promised to rid Shrek's swamp of the fairy-tale creatures currently infesting it if Shrek secures a marriageable princess. The creatures are seeking safe harbor, of course, from Farquaar's lordly persecution.

If you liked that, there's plenty more. "Shrek" abounds with flippant jokes about not only the plot but also the conventions of its genre, including a jousting match which turns into a WWF smackdown, a hilarious scene in which Farquaad interrogates the Gingerbread Man (he "softens him up" by dunking him in milk), and one of the better-handled references to "The Matrix" among the recent plethora of such references.

In fact, the fairy-tale conventions are mocked with such gusto that "Shrek" ends up being the most fart-joke-filled movie since "Dumb and Dumber," featuring fish-killing underwater bombs, numerous Donkey inquiries as to what that smell is, and even a discussion of famous ogre flatulators of years gone by. Add in the burp jokes, and a good deal of this film's running time is devoted to extremely funny gases escaping the body.

Parents may be able to distract themselves from the flatul-o-rama with the numerous snide references to Disney itself, purveyor of so many beloved and predictable children's tales: the very presence of the talking Donkey, the appearance of Fiona's imprisonment castle, which is stolen almost to the last atom of brimstone from "Sleeping Beauty," and the brief but vicious parody of that hulking edifice of surreality, Disneyland. (Of course, Jeffrey Katzenberg, ex-player at Disney and current co-founder of "Shrek"'s DreamWorks, had nothing to do with these potshots at Disney, with which he has had several bitter legal battles over the last few years, especially with Mickey Mouse CEO Michael Eisner. Whatever - corporate infighting has never been so entertaining.) And the jokes never stop coming. "Shrek" is a funny, funny film.

Directors Andrew Adamson and Vicky Johnson have dealt with both computer and traditional animation before, and they made the wise decision not to dazzle the viewer with flamboyant pixellation but rather to use the computers to serve the story. Thus, the animation is perfectly natural and addictively watchable. It's hard to go back to cel-and-inks once you've watched a lot of this stuff on the big screen. Our directors also whip through the jokes at a rapid pace - after all, they do have to get all that stuff into eighty minutes - but the film never feels rushed, and slows down appropriately to tell its morals.

Ah yes, those morals. They're familiar, starchy morals: be true to your friends, appearances don't matter, true love is where you find it. The only problem is, those of a more cynical bent may be encouraged by "Shrek"'s wicked deconstruction of the elements of the fairy tale to go further and apply the same laughing cynicism to its messages. After all, who can honestly assert that in real life, as opposed to happily distant children's stories, appearances don't matter? In our world, Fiona would glimpse Shrek in a crowd and shrink from the thought and try to excise the memory, and another glancing encounter would determine an unhappy path. "Shrek" itself stops just short of such debunking in its spree of tweaking and amusing, but its jokes suggest this path nevertheless, and within the film it's a disheartening path to take.

Still, the children who are supposed to enjoy "Shrek" won't go down that road - that's why we love them. If you can suspend your cynicism you'll find yourself enjoying "Shrek" as well, laughing at its wicked humor with the certainty that things will turn out happily ever after.

I AM NOT GOING TO ASK LITTLE CHILDREN WHAT THEY THINK OF MOVIES ANYMORE

Has anyone noticed that we are raising a nation of inarticulate five-year-olds? I went around and asked a whole bunch of children what their opinions of "Shrek" were after the screening, so that I could put an especially quotable one in the paper, thereby letting me not have to guess at children's opinions and letting the kid feel like a big shot since his words will be in some paper somewhere. But every child was responding with monosyllables when the big blond kid twice their size came up to them and asked what they thought of the film. (They all liked it, by the way.) Since this has, in all honesty, been the case every single time I have tried to do this (the sentences I quoted in "Spy Kids" were actually spoken to the child's mother and overheard by me), I have to conclude that this is not an especially fruitful avenue of inquiry. So I ain't gonna do it anymore. But I still think it was a good idea.

I should have gone with my gut instinct in writing this review, which is bascially only described in the penultimate paragraph. This is one of the few reviews in which I did not go with my gut instinct, and I feel a lot more embarrassed by it than I do by a massive lapse of judgment, as in, for example, "Say It Isn't So." As a critic, in my view of the situation anyway, you have to use your critical faculties to justify that feeling you get in your gut, whether you're uplifted or moved or puzzled or bored or whatever. You absolutely cannot reason from parts to whole. You have to break it down the other way. I didn't do that here, and I regret it.

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