Shrek 3

Shrek is a computer-animated movie adaptation of William Steig's 1990 fairy tale picture-book of the same name. It was released by DreamWorks SKG in May 2001. It was the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, a category introduced in 2002. It was released on DVD on November 2 2001.

The name Shrek is probably derived from the German word schrecklich, meaning terrible.

The film features the voices of Mike Myers as a large green ogre named Shrek, Cameron Diaz as Princess Fiona, Eddie Murphy as a talkative donkey, and John Lithgow as the vain Lord Farquaad. The soundtrack includes music by Smash Mouth, The Proclaimers, Jason Wade and Rufus Wainwright.

The film contains many parodies of classic Disney films. Lord Farquaad's face visually resembles Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who fired current Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg from Disney in 1994.

The voice of Shrek was originally recorded by Chris Farley. After his death, Mike Myers was brought on to replace him. After Myers had completed providing the voice for the character and the movie was well into production, he asked to be allowed to re-record all of his lines in a Scottish accent.

The film was extremely successful on release in 2001 and it helped establish DreamWorks as a prime competitor to Walt Disney Pictures in the field of animation, particularly in computer animation.

Sequels

• Shrek 2 was released on May 19, 2004 and quickly overtook Disney's Finding Nemo as the highest grossing opening weekend for an animated feature.

• Shrek 3 A sequel with that title was announced on June 2, 2004. According to the studio, it is planned for release in the winter of 2006, and members of the crew are to include the writing team of Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman and Mike Myers as Shrek, Eddie Murphy as the donkey, and Cameron Diaz as Princess Fiona.

• Shrek 4 was announced on August 19, 2004 and is planned to bring back all the cast and be released in 2010.

• Shrek 5, or a prequel to the first Shrek, is suspected from Katzenberg's statement, "Shrek 3 and 4 are going to reveal other unanswered questions and, finally, in the last chapter, we will understand how Shrek came to be in that swamp, when we meet him in the first movie. There is a reason he came to be there, but there is another chapter to the story before that."

Other media

Stieg, Wiliam (1990). Shrek , Sunburst Paperback. ISBN 0-374-46623-8

Also several video game adaptations of Shrek have been published on various game console platforms.