There was a time when swearing was a big no-no in films from the squeaky clean DreamWorks stable. But then we had "cunt" in American Beauty, and now, in Shrek, their glucose-enriched computer animation comedy for all the family, we have "fuckwad". That is: the evil Lord Farquaad, who banishes all fairy tale characters from his kingdom, and the purpose of whose odd name can only be to contain that single entendre. It's hardly a pointer to the rest of the movie's tone; in fact it's a measure of Shrek's uproarious wholesomeness that it almost gets away with the sheer effrontery of that gag without anyone noticing.
Shrek itself is the name of a big, green, cantankerous ogre voiced by Mike Myers in a slightly scaled-down version of his "Fat Bastard" Scottish accent. And that name has a Germanic, Grimm brothers feel: Schreck, horror; or perhaps the kiddie phrase Schreckbild, or bogey man. Either way, he's a horrible, giant, oafish creature who stomps crossly about in a kind of medieval jerkin, terrifying the local villagers and doing gross things like removing a great conical plug of wax from his ear to serve as a candle.
But Shrek's grumpy solitude is invaded when the autocratic Farquaad decrees that all fairy tale creatures - dwarves, blind mice, mendacious wooden boys with growing noses, the lot - should be herded into a holding camp that happens to be Shrek's back garden. Farquaad offers to remove them if Shrek helps him with his love life. The ogre must journey forth and bring back the beauteous Princess Fiona - whose Waspy name is in evident contradistinction to Shrek's central European handle - for Farquaad to marry. In addition to this burden, Shrek has to endure the companionship of a feisty talking donkey, brilliantly voiced by Eddie Murphy in a very similar role to the character he played in the Disney cartoon, Mulan. Fiona's ineffably blonde and patrician tones are courtesy of Cameron Diaz, and the villainous Farquaad is John Lithgow, whose vocal characterisation is somewhere between Kelsey Grammer and Alan Rickman.
All these people get unprecedented star billing on the posters and opening credits. It's a very long way from, say, George Sanders as Shere Khan in Disney's The Jungle Book, whose contribution was acknowledged in vanishingly small type at the end - a convention which has held firm until now. Does cranking up the star factor in this way mean an increase in status and prestige for the animation genre?
Possibly. At any rate, Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson's film contains some breathtaking state-of-the-art computer animation, with every blade of grass in the meadow and every donkey hair lovingly distinguished. This film is more lively, more sparky, and indeed more animated than Disney's ponderous Dinosaur - and the better craftsmanship here consequently does more comic and dramatic work.
But the comparison with the Toy Story movies can't be avoided, and here Shrek inevitably suffers. Perhaps that is unfair: hardly any film measures up. The Toy Stories were dazzlingly daring, playfully self-referential, and had genuinely moving moments. Shrek cannot match them. In fact, its animation, like its storyline, is developed in a much more conservative direction. Toy Story foregrounded the fact that its animated protagonists were toys - doubly unreal, their clothes, skin tone and facial expressions were vividly unnatural. They were found behind cellophane, or as simulacra of themselves in computer games, or in a bizarre landscape of Brobdingnagian domestic items: huge chairs and tables, and carpets in which each nylon whorl was visible. The animation made sport with the sheer fantastical unreality of it all.
But Shrek, Donkey, Fiona and Farquaad inhabit not a zany, fractured unreality, more a kind of unitary hyper-real universe that could be approximated far more easily in ordinary live action movies. The great rolling fields that Shrek crosses reminded me of the road to Oz, or even the grasslands of TV's Teletubbies. And the actual faces of human beings - Farquaad, Fiona, the villagers and courtiers - were disappointingly ordinary looking and unexpressive, almost like claymation figures.
Set against that, though, is the pzazz of the story and a very nice script from Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman and Roger Schulman. Not a minute goes by without a happy invention or a laugh line of some kind. My favourite was Farquaad torturing information out of a gingerbread man that he has chained to a table after breaking off its legs. "You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man," he sneers cruelly. And there is a terrific romantic sequence where Shrek and Fiona stroll through a meadow, having inflated a toad and a snake as balloons, to the sound of My Beloved Monster by the Eels. Shrek may not have the class of Buzz Lightyear, but he's a lovable great lunk, and you could do a lot worse this summer than see this.