Culture

‘The Guardian’ Just Got Dragged Through The Swamp For Trying To Claim That ‘Shrek’ Is Shit

'The Guardian' ain't the sharpest tool in the shed.

by Michelle Rennex  20 May 2021
shrek the guardian

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The animated masterpiece that is Shrek turned 20 this week, and as expected think pieces on the kid’s film were aplenty.

While BuzzFeed spoke about the lasting impact Shrek has had on culture over the last two decades and over at Junkee we focused on just how damn good the Shrek soundtrack is, others decided to use the opportunity to generate as many hate clicks as possible by shitting all over the film.

And by others, I am specifically talking about Scott Tobias, a film critic from The Guardian who published an article on Tuesday that called Shrek an “unfunny and overrated low for blockbuster animation”.

Yes, Shrek. The franchise that has grossed over $3.5 billion USD at the worldwide box office, and the blockbuster hit that was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. That Shrek. 

Clearly lacking taste and craving violence, Tobias first finds issue in the fact that the titular character has an outhouse that has a working toilet because he is a slob who lives in a swamp. Blasphemy! Not a working toilet in a tale about a giant ogre that has a talking donkey for a best friend!

Looking back at the film’s opening, where Shrek wipes his ass with a literal fairytale ending, Tobias believes that the flushing sound signifies “the moment when blockbuster animation circled the drain”.

“Shrek is a terrible movie. It’s not funny. It looks awful,” the author continues, completely devoid of joy in his life. “It would influence many unfunny, awful-looking computer-animated comedies that copied its formula of glib self-reference and sickly sweet sentimentality.”

“The fairytale comedy was a hit with critics and audiences but its toilet humour, glibness and shoddy animation mark it out as a misfire.”

Try as he might, Scott Tobias can’t quite seem to wrap his head around Shrek’s continued success. Instead of just accepting that it is a good movie that is well-loved around the world, Tobias decides to drag how “comprehensively bad its legacy remains”.

Shrek apparently “encouraged a destructive, know-it-all attitude toward the classics” and made it that “those once-upon-a-times were now rendered stodgy and lame, literally toilet paper”.

You see, Tobias is mad. He hates that Shrek changed animation. He misses the classic fairytales and wants everything to be like The Good Old Days™️. He despises that celebrities play sassy CGI animals and spit out “committee-polished one-liners” as if every movie these days isn’t just calculated Oscar bait anyway.

But as Tobias puts it, Shrek is too disinterested in “the fairytale it creates” and is too focused on the “excess of anachronisms and buddy-movie riffs that have little relation to the backdrop and woe-is-me-soppiness to the love story between two lonely, misunderstood freaks”.

“What’s left is an all-ages film that’s somehow more crude and juvenile in its appeals to adults than children,” Tobias concludes his takedown. “The entire enterprise is better left in the past.”

Now, The Guardian and Scott Tobias knew exactly what they were doing with this review of sorts. A hate click is still a click, right?

While it is true that this Shrek takedown likely generated a whole bunch of traffic for the publication, what Scott Tobias failed to realise was that he was messing with the Shrek Heads of the world — a fiercely loyal and defensive stan group that will do anything for their fearless green leader.

So, while Tobias tried to drag Shrek through the swamp, everyone else tragged the author through the mud for his terrible attempt at generating outrage towards a beloved classic.

While Smash Mouth had previously tried to avoid being tied to the film, the band’s founder Paul DeLisle recently told USA Today that they have fully embraced being the Shrek band.

“That’s how we’re identified: Kids are like, ‘look, it’s the Shrek guys. We are the Shrek band. What are you gonna do? You can’t fight it. I just embrace it. You’ve got to be a good sport about it.”

So it makes sense that even Smash Mouth came to the defence of our favourite green ogre and shut down The Guardian’s piece with four simple words: “Said NO BODY EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lol.”

If you learn anything from this, let it be to not talk shit about Shrek. After all, Shrek is love. Shrek is life.