Shrek (Mike Myers) showers with mud.
Courtesy of DreamWorks
Twenty-five years ago, a swamp-dwelling ogre with a thick Scottish brogue named Shrek rescued a princess from the clutches of a fire-breathing dragon…
And animation hasn’t been the same since.
DreamWorks’ refreshingly subversive take on classic fairy tales was, to paraphrase Smash Mouth, a shooting star that shattered the mold.
“It appealed to very young children, all the way up to grannies and grandpas,” Harry Gregson-Williams, who composed the Shrek score alongside John Powell, said over Zoom celebrating an upcoming vinyl release from Varèse Sarabande.
“A lot of people were probably surprised and relieved that they could take their kids to a movie and get something out of it themselves; that it wasn’t all dumbed-down, infantile stuff,” he continued. “If you listened carefully, there were doubles entendres, there was something for everybody, and I think that was kind of unusual for children’s animation at that time.”
In other words, the movie flew directly in the face of Disney’s approach to adapting the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. DreamWorks’ co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg had something of a bone to pick with the Mouse House, which unceremoniously fired him in 1994, and Shrek offered a golden opportunity to give his former employers a big, green middle finger.
“I honestly think everybody at DreamWorks was really trying to find a way to be the non-Disney, anti-Disney, whatever you like to call it,” mused Powell, famous for his work on the studio’s How to Train Your Dragon franchise. “Whatever Disney does, we’ll do the opposite.”
A rough-around-the-edges fairy tale mashup chock full of innuendos and pop culture references told from the perspective of a character one would traditionally consider a “monster” made it stand out from everything that came before.
Hell, Shrek was so groundbreaking that it led to the creation of the Oscars’ Best Animated Feature award.
“It’s a very good outsider story elegantly done,” Powell explained. “The idea of the outsider who is actually happy being the outsider is quite unusual, and maybe that’s the thing that really gave it a backbone.”
Shrek 25th anniversary vinyl
Courtesy of Varèse Sarabande
Despite an eclectic and memorable collection of needle drops from Smash Mouth, Joan Jett and The Proclaimers, Eels, and Leonard Cohen, Shrek’s unique identity starts with Gregson-Williams and Powell’s score. The very first piece of music heard on the soundtrack, “Fairtytale,” became the de facto theme of the entire series.
“We wanted to give the audience a slight misdirect at the beginning of the film,” shared Gregson-Williams, who would go on to score the next three Shrek movies, as well as the Shrek 4-D ride at Universal’s theme parks in Orlando and Los Angeles. “So, before they’d even met any of the characters, they’d think, ‘Oh yeah, we know where we are. This is like a Disney movie we’ve seen 100 times before.’ And before you know it, you’re into that Smash Mouth song, and this is anything but Aladdin or one of those wonderful movies.”
Of course, the “Fairytale” cue became permanently intertwined with Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), who pictured a perfect fairy tale ending for years before her mud-loving soulmate (Mike Myers) turned up to save her with some help from a loquacious donkey (Eddie Murphy).
What Fiona thought of as a curse only broken by true love’s first kiss, à la Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, turns out to be the greatest blessing she could have received. Beauty becomes the beast, as it were, rather than the other way around.
“It became a really useful tool,” added Gregson-Williams. “I don’t think either of us realized in the first few weeks of writing music for this how important that would become … I was so happy to be able to have that tune for everything that followed the first movie. [It] represented purity and longing and the fairy tale end of things, which is what Fiona always wanted, but keeps getting rebuffed at every turn.”
Another pivotal cue was “Eating Alone,” which plays during Shrek’s peaceful swamp-home dinner before the area is invaded by every fairy tale creature imaginable. The composition needed to be indicative of the titular hero, “a lumpy, grumpy, very-badly-put-together, and not-very-well-produced piece of music,” said Gregson-Williams. “We felt we had the melody, but trying to find the correct arrangement for it was kind of tough.”
They initially arranged it for cello, performed by renowned musician Martin Tillman, but it didn’t have sound they wanted. As such, Powell suggested they ask Tillman to come back and play “Eating Alone” on a double bass with no advance warning. While they might be similar in appearance, a cello and double bass “are not necessarily compatible,” noted Powell. “Suddenly, everything’s in the wrong place, so he was very uncomfortable playing [that], whereas when he was playing the cello, he was playing very confidently.”
“[Martin] just showed up, John brought in this kind of battered, old double bass, and we asked Martin to play it,” remembered Gregson-Williams. “He didn’t play it very well, but he could get his fingers around it, and it turned out to be kind of lumpy and grumpy, and exactly what we wanted. We played it for the filmmakers, and they loved it.”
Echoed Powell: “A tune is a tune, but I think how you perform it, how you get it performed, how you of present it at certain moments in the film, says a lot about the character. And I think what they liked was this basic arrangement around a very weirdly-voiced instrument that’s not supposed to play the tune.”
Looking ahead, Powell is already knee-deep in the scoring swamp for the long-awaited Shrek 5. Helmed by Conrad Vernon (Shrek 2) and Walt Dohrn (Trolls Band Together), the movie hits theaters on June 30, 2027.
“It’s absolutely right and proper that he would be doing it,” said Gregson-Williams on passing the onion…er, torch. “I have no hard feelings about that. I had my amazing decade with Shrek, and I’ll be first in line to see what John does with it.”
Powell, meanwhile, couldn’t say much about his work on the forthcoming sequel, except that he wants the music to sound “new and interesting, but warm and familiar as well.”
“It’s going to be interesting to return and review and play in that world again,” he concluded. “I’ll probably try and make an effort to shift it a bit, as long as it’s [in line] with the story,” he concluded. “There are story elements in it that I’m very suitable for because of the history of some of the films I’ve done, and some of the characters that appear in this one … The idea is you get these films and really become inspired by them, and, hopefully, react in an inspired way.”
Varèse Sarabande’s 25th anniversary vinyl release of the Shrek soundtrack goes on sale Friday, Aug. 28. Click here to pre-order.