According to James Poniewozik’s recent Times article “Is Shrek Bad for Kids?” Shrek is, in fact, bad for kids. To delve in a bit deeper: kids are being subjected to the post-modern and parodical tendencies of Shrek prior to developing a basic understanding of traditional narrative forms as exemplified by the Disney modus operandi. Poniewozik obsesses over the equation that tradition followed by subversive interference = postmodernism. He obsesses over the idea that any variation within this equation creates a complete cultural misunderstanding. Now, I may not actively agree with the idea that that is a direct and necessary path, but what I find to be the underlying flaw in his argument is his assumption that Shrek is in fact a postmodern examination of a classic tradition. If postmodernism in this case is defined as not merely a narrative or visual style but an entire ideology based primarily around subversive cynicism then postmodern Shrek is not. I’ll explain. While the ‘ideal’ classical children’s animation isn’t explicitly defined here, it can be safely assumed that Poniewozik is referring to Disney’s first generation of animated films: The Snow Whites, the Cinderella’s. But the historical comparison is somewhat confused: Even Disney grew out of its own school of cinematic and narrative traditions in the early ‘80’s during Michael Eisner’s reign as CEO. Here we saw more directly adult content as well as Disney’s first R rated production under Touchstone (Down and Out and Beverly Hills: need I say more?). In which case: we haven’t had the saccharine and classically-influenced animation since the late sixties, making Shrek a bit of an odd choice to single out. This begs for a raised eyebrow in query: If children’s animation has been getting progressively more adult, more modern and more culturally aware, then how has Shrek reinvented New Animation in a way that its counterparts of modern animation have yet to achieve?
Well, Poniewozik says this:
"Shrek didn't remake fairy tales single-handed; it captured, and monetized, a long-simmering cultural trend [seen before in] movies like The Princess Bride…And [cultivated by] highbrow postmodern and feminist writers, such as Donald Barthelme and Angela Carter, Robert Coover and Margaret Atwood, [using] the raw material of fairy stories to subvert traditions of storytelling that were as ingrained in us as breathing or to critique social messages that their readers had been fed along with their strained peas.”
Fair enough, James, I’ll buy that this is merely an advancement in a critical style (albeit primarily literary, so it seems). It’s a style which attaches itself to not only modern ideologies of “subverting traditions of storytelling” but to simulated postmodern techniques. It is a style which wades in parody, irony, meta-fiction and political adjustment. So there seems to be some kind of argument forming here which interprets the modern twisting of classical storytelling as something inherently postmodern, which I would generally agree with. “My two sons (ages 2 and 5) love The Three Pigs,” he later adds “… It's a gorgeous, fanciful book. It's also a kind of recursive meta-fiction that I didn't encounter before reading John Barth in college.” But Shrek, in any of one of its three installments, is hardly a Barthian meta-narrative. I will happily concede that the films toy with a little folkloric pastiche here and splash in handfuls of present-day ethics there. Yes, in a faraway land called Duloc, women aren’t merely passive waifs, traditional antagonists now have heart, traditional protagonists are questioned, and fairy tales are rewritten with a grin in order to be easily translatable within certain current social codes. But I’m not so quick to believe that that is the exemplification of true modernization so much as a superficial shift toward a kind of general cultural satiation.
There is a large crevice between being merely up-to-date and being post-modern in that post-modernism surpasses being secondary to the narrative and functions in a way that allows it to be more than simply a kind of modern varnish. Shrek is a film which follows the same well-trodden path of soppy morality lessons and heavy-handed subtexts which teach that “true beauty lies within” and “love conquers all”, recreating fairy tale plotlines to a T: misunderstood underdog travels long distance, earns the heart of some girl and finally gains general fame and acceptance. This makes Shrek at its deepest level no more than a single and elaborate allegory for kissing a toad. Yeah, the guy is hideous and disgusting and rarely bathes but man is he personable. In other words, the true meat of this story is an endlessly predictable string of classic traditions. Shrek differs from the Disney relics of the 1950’s in that it obsesses with modern pop culture but it is impossible to ignore how inseparable its core is to the past. This revised breed of animation relies on little but a steady stream of gestures and occasional quotations to mark its modernity but, sadly, superficially adding social references on top of a plot that is very weighted in the past is not enough to make it a postmodern animation. Shrek fails not because it does not dramatically re-invent a specific tradition but rather because of its reliance on both the core value of folklore and reiteration of core traditions in fairy tales. It simply gives a slightly different version of the same story while leaving any postmodern tendency as simple surface detail. Fair do’s, James: Postmodernism is by its nature a self-indulgent form, saved only by its reflective ability to be aware of its own self-indulgence and in this sense Shrek does outgrow it predecessors in its modernity. It endlessly absorbs pop forms of narration, music integration, and cultural awareness. But it's also of a quality of genre which uses this kind of cultural tangency to criticise its context, to become a kind of cultural iconoclast. And this is what Shrek lacks. It lacks the ability to become more than a cultural marker and seems to confuse the act of cultural over-saturation for the sake of cultural over-saturation for post-modern iconoclastic pastiche.
