Shrek the movie: creating the myth

Shrek: Modern Myth

Storytelling is as naturally human as breathing. Every culture has stories, and usually a venerated position of storyteller or re-enactor -- whether they are literally oral storytellers writers, actors, singers, artists, and even film directors, storytellers have existed as long as human society has. As Linda Seger notes in her essay "Creating Myth," there are also many similarities between the stories that all cultures tell (Seger, 1). These mythical archetypes are universally recognizable, and even modern films like Shrek can be shown to stem directly from these sources (seger, 5).

Shrek is an animated film about an ogre who ends up -- quite reluctantly -- on a quest to save a princess. The film incorporates many commonly known fairy tales and nursery rhymes, largely to comic effect, and adds some changes to the basic fairy tale plot. But at its heart, this movie is a very typical fairy tale, which is perhaps the most direct form of myth available to us today. There are some very easily identifiable archetypes in the film -- Shrek, the hero; Donkey, the sidekick; Fiona, the princess in distress -- and the plot also follows a fairly traditional trajectory. Like most fairy tales, Shrek is a story of personal discovery as well as external achievement.

Seger identifies two basic types of myths at the start of her esy, the searching myth and the hero myth: "Some of these stories are 'search' stories. They address our desire to find some kind of rare and wonderful treasure...[hero stories] come from our own experiences of overcoming adversity, as well as our desire to do great and special acts" (Seger, 1). It is significant that Seger phrases her statements in the inclusive first person; these stories are collectively ours, and remain entertaining and compelling because they express sentiments and desires common to all human experience, and this is one of the most important lessons in Shrek.

The film falls into both categories of myth that Seger identifies. Shrek is a "search" story because it involves a quest for treasure -- externally, Shrek is after the Princess and is seeking the reward of being left at peace in his swamp, and on a more profound level the film shows both he and Fiona on to be quests to discover themselves and their capacity for love and self-acceptance that they didn't really now they were on. Both internal and external searches find strong origins in myth (Seger, 1). It is also a hero story about overcoming prejudice against the fairy tale creatures (one of the best scenes is the brutal interrogation of a gingerbread man who is a member of the resistance), with Shrek as the primary hero. The film is nontraditional in that the hero never starts out as mundane, but ultimately gains a "normal" existence (Seger, 2).