In this corner, anachronistic pop music that's anywher from three years to decades out of date. There is no narrative evolution on display here: it's an enlarged cast running through exactly the same types of jokes as the last time, and the time before that. But alack, it will be more than a month yet before I get to see that studio's latest, and Shrek the Third is what I have to deal with right now.įrankly, it's fairly clear to me that even for those who loved the first two films, this third Shrek suffers rather badly from diminishing returns.
Surely Pixar, particularly Finding Nemo, has put the lie to that notion by now. Setting aside the idea that different people have different senses of humor, what really frustrates me is the idea that an animated film needs to have two discreet levels of text for young people and older people (Dreamworks Animation does this constantly).
Frankly, I'm not even sure which of those three types of "comedy" offend me the most, but I know this: the Shrek series delights to traffic in all three. Then let me be a crank and be proud of it, for if there's one thing that I've never been able to stand it's the modern idea that the only way for a cartoon to be funny is for it to be porked out with shrill pop culture references and lowest-common-denominator sex jokes for the parents smeared on top of the lowest-common-denominator fart and shit jokes for their kids.
In the interests of full disclosure, I thought pretty much exactly the same thing about Shrek and Shrek 2, and I understand that this makes me a mirthless crank. Thankfully, nobody in the theater where I saw Shrek the Third was laughing very much at all, so I don't have to pretend that it was anything other than a complete waste of time. I would like to share a bit of received wisdom with you all: you can't tell somebody that what they're laughing at isn't funny.