Once upon a time, Shrek defined Dreamworks Animation Studios; these new kids on the cartoon block, the hipster ogre seemed to say: they aren't stuffy like they House of Mouse gang; they get pop culture, they get pop music, they get you. Unhappily, by Shrek The Third, all that snark and celebrity had worn awfully thin. The Shrek sequence had succumbed to the same gangrenous devices that defined Madagascar and Shark Tale, namely lazy plotting, disconnected parody, and stunt casting.
Shrek Forever After goes some way to making things right again. In common with the last Dreamworks outing – the genuinely fantastic How to Train Your Dragon – this fourth picture in the billion-dollar franchise is content to stick to the Shrek-iverse. It’s a welcome development; there are no 'funny' animals dancing to 'Funky Town' and no further references to Justin Timberlake. Tellingly, the film casts the head writer, not say, Brad Pitt, as the villainous Rumplestilskin.
One could not claim, however, that Shrek 4 works as a standalone piece. Instead, this rather fond farewell trades on the familiarity of the characters. Cast into a parallel universe in which the events of the last three films never happened, our hero (a subdued Mike Myers) finds Far Far Away policed by witches, ruled by a despot and defined by Islamic(!) architecture. Oppressed and angry, Fiona (Cameron Diaz) now leads a faction of rebellious ogres, Donkey (Eddie Murphy) miserably pulls carts and Puss (Antonio Banderas) is an overweight housecat. Can the title character make things right again?
By casting Shrek in an all-ages version of It’s A Wonderful Life, the filmmakers are allowed to reset the clock at zero; Shrek and Fiona duly fall in love again, the dead king (John Cleese) gets another outing, everybody is reintroduced and all misanthropic urges are conquered. It’s not quite enough to constitute going out in a blaze of glory, but it does allow the series to bow out on a dignified note. It beats the hell out of Shrek the Third at any rate.