Generations of American children have been raised on fairy tales. These stories are such a part of childhood that Bruno Bettelheim, in that wonderful psychoanalytic spirit of sucking the joy out of just about anything, wrote about the role fairy tales play in child development in his book The Uses of Enchantment. Certainly little girls, with their dreams of big white weddings and marriage to whatever the contemporary interpretation of Handsome Prince Charming may be at a given time, have fairy tales drummed into their heads from an early age.

Credit the producers of SHREK 2, then, for having the audacity to pick up the story AFTER the wedding and honeymoon, and telling us what REALLY happens when two lives actually begin to merge onto that common path called marriage; when the in-laws come into play and you have to be an adult instead of just someone's child -- and manage to create not just the sweetest film of the year so far, but undoubtedly the funniest.

You've got to love a film that manages to send up Little Red Riding Hood, Splash, Tinkerbell, Dudley Moore and Bo Derek in 10, shampoo commercials, and the Lord of the Rings films -- and that's just during the opening song. If it stopped there, SHREK 2 would already have been worth the price of admission. But in its efficient 93 minutes of running time, screenwriters Andrew Adamson, Joe Stillman, J. David Stem, and David N. Weiss (and yes they are worth thanking by name) manage to capture more of the zany, anarchic, snarky world of the heyday of Warner Brothers than Looney Tunes: Back in Action could ever hope to -- and warm your heart in the bargain.

The key to the success of the old Looney Tunes was that the animators, shunted off in their own little fiefdom in Termite Terrace at the Warner studios made those short films for themselves, and if anyone else liked them, that was gravy. As we all know, everyone did like them, and generations of kids and adults laughed themselves silly whether they recognized the landmarks of cultural zeitgeist being sent up or not -- until Turner got hold of them, chopped them up, put some of the best ones in the vault simply because they had racial themes not considered politically correct today, and sold them off to Viacom, where they now languish on the Boomerang channel, upstaged by crap like Spongebob Squarepants. SHREK 2 directors Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon obviously remember, because they have managed to capture the same spirit of anarchic cultural sendup and they've done it even better the second time around. The film has barely hit theatres, and I'm already hoping that some of the story conferences make it onto the special edition DVD

But here we are, with Shrek and Fiona having just returned from their honeymoon to find that Fiona's Mom and Dad, the King and Queen of Far, Far Away, want to meet their new son-in-law throw a shindig for the happy couple. Unbeknownst to Fiona's mother, however, her father has made a pact with Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders, the cellulite-obsessed Edina of Absolutely Fabulous) to have Fiona marry her handsome-but-unctuous son, Prince Charming.

In a meeting right out of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (and probably many real families as well), the happy couple endure an excruciating dinner with the folks, which drains whatever is left of Fiona's courage to embrace her ogrous self, and like so many young people who have enough guts to marry someone of whom their parents don't approve, her courage only goes so far, and she reverts back to the little girl who just wants her parents' approval. Shrek, who is nothing if not comfortable in his own skin, insists that she knew what he was when she married him and he doesn't have to give an inch. Fiona disagrees: "I made changes for you," she reminds him regretfully.

It's nothing short of astounding that a sequel to a commercially successful animated film brimming with fart jokes is perhaps the only film, and certainly the only comedy, to so realistically capture the struggles that young couples go through in breaking away from their parents after marriage. That what is essentially a fairy tale deals with such explosive issues as family obligation, being true to oneself,and the real meaning of love was only touched on in the first film, but here reaches a fruition that gives this riotously funny film an unexpected depth.

In this sequel, Jeffrey Katzenberg seems well on his way to resolving his Mike Eisner issues. While Disney is still a target of derision, what with the Far Far Away castle bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Magic Kingdom image used for years on the Wonderful World of Disney, and Jennifer Saunders' Fairy Godmother clearly a demonic take on Angela Lansbury's hearty, kindly characters in Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Beauty and the Beast. But this time, all of Hollywood is skewered, and it couldn't happen to a nicer town. For the land of Far, Far Away (Are we there yet? Are we there now?) is essentially an even more Disnefied, Mallified, Hollywood, complete with "Versarcher" Archery supplies shop, and a "Farbucks" coffee shop on every corner. The sheer dreckiness of this particular rendition of La-La-Land neatly sets the stage for the satire on shallow looksism that the SHREK team finally gets right.

I did not love the first SHREK, largely because hidden not-so-well behind its supposedly affirming story was a message that if you're ugly, there's an ugly ogre out there for you and you can live happily ever after -- in the swamp. The first film was all Hollywood, and just as shallow, whereas this film has the good sense to tell Hollywood to go stuff it. The embrace of the id of life in the swamp has all of the really FUN deadly sins, like lust and gluttony. Fiona and Shrek are a couple who go for the gusto, whether it's chowing down on the picnic basket a terrified Little Red Riding Hood (missing only the cry of "Hey Grandma!!") leaves behind, or PG-rated rutting on the beach a la Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity, or having flatulence contests in a mud bath. The swamp may be funky, but it's the loamy, yeasty, sexual kind of funky you get in tropical rainforests -- and it's packed with warm friendships that are far more accepting and loving than many families. Far Far Away, however, is a sensualist's version of hell,with all the shallowness of Hollywood and all the stultifying ritual and expectations of royal life. If you had the choice between gleeful rutting and gluttony and friends who accept you for what you are (even if one of them IS the "annoying talking animal" Donkey, reprised with no less humor this time by Eddie Murphy) and a husband who adores you; and life with the narcissistic Prince Charming (a hiliariously foppish Rupert Everett), his compulsive eater of a mother-in-law (all right, so they didn't get rid of ALL the shallowness), and your own twittish parents, which woud YOU pick?

It would be churlish to spoil all the gags for you, and indeed, they come so fast and so frequently that I don't think it's possible to catch them all the first time through. But perhaps the best gag is the inspired introduction of the character of Puss in Boots, voiced with hilarious aplomb, and true catness, by Antonio Banderas. Happily, Banderas realized a while back that his preposterously fabulous good looks, Latin lover accent, and incongruously goofy/twinkly demeanor made his very presence in a movie signify High Camp of the best possible sort. Here, freed from his own physical persona, he jauntily snatches the movie away from Myers and Murphy with his feline claws and saunters right off with it all by himself. The animators purposefully made Puss size-proportionate, so his Scarlet Pimpernel grandeur out of all proportion to his size is just the sort of air that anyone who has ever had cats will recognize perfectly -- along with the embarrassment that follows the hawking up of a hairball and the ability to manipulate humans -- or ogres -- by simply looking pitiful. If there were an Academy Award for voice work in an animated film (and damn it, there ought to be), Banderas ought to be its first winner.

The film also features a number of utterly forgettable songs which lack the snarky zing of the Smashmouth numbers in the first film. The song "Accidentally In Love" which opens the film is mercifully drowned out by the joyous visuals. I don't know what possessed anyone to decide that Adam Duritz of Counting Crows is just the right person to compose a happy love song, but his mournful voice seems incongruous in the utterly gleeful daffiness of the sequence. It's a serviceable enough song, I suppose, in that Awful Oscar Performance kind of way, but it sounds like the introduction to a lame sitcom rather than to a very funny film. A later number, called simply the Fairy Godmother Song, seems to be a spoof of "Bibbedy Bobbedy Boo" and every other Disney film song, with some snappy lyrics that fly by so quickly it's impossible to catch them. The end result is that the songs seem to interrupt the flow of the film.

It's impossible to talk about SHREK 2 without mentioning the quantum leaps in the CGI animation that appear in this film. While the main human characters, such as Fiona's parents (voiced by John Cleese and Julie Andrews), Prince Charming, and Fairy Godmother, must, and do, remain just cartoonish enough to fit in with their ogrish daughter and son-in-law, they nevertheless achieve an expressiveness of facial expression never before seen in this kind of film. It is in the walk-on characters -- the patrons of the Poison Apple Pub, the passers-by, the wedding guests, that the film achieves an almost eerie meeting of the real and the cartoon universe, for these characters are so lifelike that they seem to be not just walk-ons in the film, but actually to have stumbled into a real-life Toontown.

The fact that SHREK 2 boasts a relatively mature plotline and character development, that the artwork is simply stunning, and that it's deceptively complex for a fairy tale, are simply bonuses. For the primary joy of SHREK 2 is that it's just plain and simply the most fun I've had in a movie theatre yet this year

-- Jill Cozzi

Read Gabriel's review of SHREK 2

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