In recent years most animated features made in America have been comedy features with attitude. That can be traced back to the gargantuan reception Shrek had on it’s initial release, with the film becoming (at the time) the 2nd biggest animated movie in history. Such popularity is bound to spawn copycats, and dozens of animated features since 2001 have followed the “Shrek formula”, without really understanding what made that first film so glorious to begin with.

Every movie wants to be as hip, as funny, as popular as Shrek. Unfortunately, many miss the point in Shrek altogether. Yes, it was exciting to see more adult humor in animated films, but the main reason the film worked was because the characters were amazingly well made. The sorrow Shrek felt at being left out of society simply because he was an ogre was relatable to all audience members and you rooted for the guy throughout his journey. A sequence, showing all the characters in the film dealing with various emotional situations, set to the song Hallelujah is a devastating thing to witness, mainly because all the people depicted in that sequence are so fleshed out at this point.

Thankfully, Shrek 2 managed to keep those well developed characters and push them into new places. The addition of Puss In Boots is one of the films many ingenious ideas as is the transformation of Shrek the Ogre to Shrek the human. But the films best asset may be the use of John Cleese as Fiona’s father, a man whose journey parallels Shrek’s in unexpected ways. I distinctly remember when the film came out and broke an insane amount of box office records, it’s popularity leading many to declare it to be better than it’s predecessor. I wouldn’t quite go that far, but Shrek 2 is still an extraordinary film that is way, way funnier and adult (I think this is the only family film to contain a marijuana reference) than you might expect.

So now, two classic films under it’s belt, DreamWorks Animation obviously had to make a third film, this one mixing in a bunch of new characters into the mix, as well as the revelation of Shrek being a father. This is where things get insanely off the rails for the series, with the main problem coming in the form of where those new characters come from. Now, the entire Shrek universe is one where fairytale characters mingle on a regular basis, with many being send ups of their universally beloved Disney personas.

But in Shrek The Third, the franchise features be a wide gamut of characters from Camelot mythology. Mixing in these characters with the residents of the world of fairy tale people doesn’t gel on any level, but perhaps if the writing had been as sharp as the first two films, things could at least have been humorous enough to divert attention from this. But nobody, not even Eric Idle, can make this whole thing anything less than atrocious. Few, if any, good jokes escape this terrible production that’s biggest crime may be reducing Eddie Murphy’s (perhaps the funniest thing in the whole series) role in the film to one or two expository lines.

While the bloom was off the rose in terms of people’s love of Shrek, there was still enough juice for one “last” movie. Shrek Forever After would take things back to the roots of the first film and give an emotional send off to everybody. Not a bad idea actually, and the fact that we can see more ogres is a cool idea. In the end, it’s more of a mediocre affair than a truly bad one, but it’s still a crushing disappointment compared to where these films started from. At least this one allows Eddie Murphy to deliver some great lines, while Rumpelstiltskin makes for a good bad guy, though his loud personality can get weary after a while.  One problem though is how sad things are, with very little time left for funny gags, the franchises bread and butter.

In the end, the Shrek franchise ends on a downtrodden note that at least caps things off with a nice reprise of All-Star (which, along with the titular tune from Space Jam, was THE song to sing when I was a kid). Still, it was obviously time to finish things off, though a spin-off for Puss In Boots did emerge in the fall of 2011, which ironically turned out to be better than the last two movies in the film series it spawned from. Yet, it is weird to note that a few days after I decided to pick this film series for my newest entry in the Franchise Frenzy saga, DreamWorks Animation noted a fifth Shrek film was likely to come out soon.

Man, I couldn’t have planned this whole thing out better if I tried. Because unlike the other two film series I’ve reviewed, the franchise known as Shrek is still going to continue on, and probably won’t stop until humanity is replaced by cyborgs. Looking on all four of these movies, there’s obviously still stories they can tell, but hopefully newer installments bring back some of the more adult humor and well developed characters that made the first two movies so beloved. Those two really did set the tone for all of animated cinema for years to come, and hopefully a fifth Shrek can live up to the lofty heights (some of) it’s predecessors have set.