I can see why this movie isn’t as memorable as the first.

If you really look at Shrek 2 and boil it down to the bare bones it’s very similar to the first Shrek movie. We have the prince who is usually the good guy in fairytales being a bad guy again, we have the trope of Shrek not being good enough for Fiona like in the first movie when he rescues her, and once again in this movie he doesn’t think that the people he’s going to meet will approve of him…but this time it’s her family.

This movie obviously escalates characters and storyline to a new level but I also feel that this works well with the story that it is trying to tell you.

In the first movie we got to see a lot of the original fairytales. We got Pinocchio, Three Blind Mice, the Gingerbread Man, everything was very old school. However when we go to Far Far Away, which seems to be a take on Hollywood, a lot of the stars of this movie are more modern. So you’ve got the Disney princesses, you’ve got the fairy godmother, and you’ve even got the bad guys who are from those same fairytales like Captain Hook and the Ugly Stepsisters.

It felt like a good elevation of the story. We got to see Shrek and Fiona’s love story continue but also meet new levels with the area that they were in. If we kept up with the older fairytales then they may have felt a bit more stale whereas because we got see the shiny new fairytales they really fit the aesthetic of the whole movie and it really helped juxtapose Shrek’s world against Far Far Away.

I feel as an adult noticing these things and also noticing the film parodies that it made that weren’t the usual fairytales was really funny and interesting to watch, however I can see as a younger audience member, who does not know these tropes and does not understand these parodies this could easily go over your head. That’s why I believe Shrek the original movie is more of a family friendly film, whereas Shrek 2 is much more for the adults that came to sit down and watch a silly movie with their children, but there’s a lot of jokes in it for them too.

That’s not to say the original didn’t have adult jokes, it did, there were plenty of them, but children could laugh at a lot of the jokes too because they were silly and fun. However some of the jokes in the second movie were much more niche and pointed and if you didn’t get the reference you wouldn’t get the joke.

I enjoy Shrek 2, I think it’s a really good film. The musical numbers in it are great, the soundtrack again is brilliant, Accidentally in Love by Counting Crows is still one of my favourite songs, and it moved the story along nicely. Although I feel when you’re comparing it to such a force as Shrek one it’s never going to hold up as well because that was so iconic.

I wouldn’t discount this movie or leave it to gather dust on the shelf. It’s a great second part to the Shrek franchise and it definitely doesn’t fall off a cliff like some of the later movies do. However I definitely feel if you were to watch Shrek one as a child and you then wait to watch Shrek 2 as a teenager or an adult with more understanding of the film industry, then you would enjoy it so much more than if you were to straight binge watch Shrek as a child.

What do you think of Shrek 2?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding