the Creature

You can eat any mushroom...once.

pack it up boys we've made a social blunder

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one more time normal style

I'm going to become a statistic

further proof god is out to get me

it's because I tore my acl senior year

I couldn't do it for religious reasons

my ex took my talent in the divorce

@thatlittleegyptologist

I know it's been almost a year since the Shrek 5 teaser came out, but I still wanted to give my two cents. In short: I think Shrek 5 should've come out in 2016. Let me explain.

There are two main factors at play: 1. The redesign is sort of unexpected (and generic). 2. It's been over 15 years since the last Shrek.

So... What happened to Shrek 5?

I'll come back to #1 later, but for now I want to focus on #2. I think a lot of people don't realise how far animation technology has evolved since Shrek Forever After, which came out in 2010.

In 2010, DreamWorks was still animating in software called Emo, which was originally made in the 80s and was essentially a very big spreadsheet with a simple scene viewer. It looked like this:

While animators could click and drag body parts, they often ended up having to manually input numbers and stare at node names - and when they wanted to see what it actually looked like, they had to wait (seconds, sometimes minutes) for it to process the changes, at which point they could view the animation for one character at a time on a very simple model. (On HTTYD, they had to animate the dragons and riders separately because the software lagged too much when showing more than one character model.)

So in 2012, after four years of development, they finally got something better: Premo. Premo allowed animators to directly manipulate the models and see their results in real time. Oh, and they could view multiple models at once! In an environment!

How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) was the first time they used Premo, and it has been used for every DreamWorks film ever since, with updates whenever new features are needed. (Premo was integrated into DWA's new software platform called Apollo, which also included a new lighting tool called Torch, so it wasn't just the animation that changed. It's important to remember that the animation itself is just one part of the filmmaking process, and that the other tools that DWA uses (for modelling, effects simulation, rendering, etc.) are also ever-changing.)

Here are a couple of gifs for comparison. Look at the amount of nuance and detail they managed to get into his performance! (I've had it pointed out to me that ensuring parts of the fingers don't clip through themselves when bending would likely have been very tricky to do in Emo.)

Not just the animation is more refined (congratulations, Hiccup, on getting some fine motor skills!), but the second render is much more detailed, too, with a focusing camera, layered clothing made of different materials that would've been a nightmare to simulate/render for DWA just a few years earlier and a much more realistic look to the skin (already better than their first foray into more detailed skin rendering, Rise of the Guardians (2012)).

This jump in quality and change in character model is obviously huge, but it was incredibly well-received. In real life, 4 years had passed (in canon, 5) so to audiences it was totally understandable that Hiccup had aged (and gotten a Generic Heartthrob Teenager redesign). Additionally, the other characters (human and dragons) remained largely the same, and exploring the dragon-loving version of Berk felt like a natural reason for a sequel.

Then came How to Train Your Dragon 3 (2019), which used broadly the same character designs as HTTYD2, but continued the realism trend with even more detailed animation and rendering. This was the first feature film to use the Moonray renderer (which, by the way, is Open Source!), and you can tell it's a huge step up in terms of lighting and texture.

The overall style feels like quite a natural step after HTTYD2, but it's totally different to HTTYD1 with its comparatively flat renders and exaggerated movements:

This is, in my opinion, also the first time that DWA has really started leaning into what I call 'squishy animation' (because of the sheer amount of squash & stretch in it), which is a pretty big trend in animation nowadays. In my personal opinion, it can look great with more cartoony characters, but kind of uncanny with more realistic ones (especially when they're generally animated realistically). (Pay close attention to Hiccup's neck and that follow-through on Toothless' body!)

Here's another example of a 'realistic' squishy animation from Disney's Strange World (2022) compared to a shot from The Bad Guys (2022), which has character models that are heavily inspired by 2D animation:

(Important caveat: I don't want to throw Strange World (2022) under the bus, because I've heard amazing things about it, but the reason I haven't seen it yet is that the movement feels very uncanny to me when combined with the relatively realistic character designs/lighting/skin.)

Additionally, if you've been paying close attention to these examples, you may notice that a lot of modern character models look sort of 'airbrushed'. Compare HTTYD1 Hiccup to HTTYD3 Hiccup:

Now, I'm sure that, to some extent, the detailing on the older models was to make up for lack of render quality. If you can't make realistic skin, you can add some freckles to at least make it look less plasticky. Even so, Hiccup used to be absolutely covered in freckles - from his face to his hands - and by HTTYD3 they're much fainter and only visible in certain lighting. (Side note: I'm not going to address Toothless' redesign here - this is already a long post - but I do think it's important to mention that he also lost a lot of detail and ended up with much softer features. There's also this article about Toothless' animation style in HTTYD2 which goes into how careful the animators had to be to ensure he wasn't off-model... which was exactly what they ended up doing intentionally in HTTYD3.)

So, with that said, I want to try to understand what happened with Shrek 5.

Shrek 5's redesigns

As far as I can tell, DWA had three options: 1. Create a unique look for Shrek 5. 2. Try to emulate their old look, necessarily making their characters look dated. 3. Follow the trend, redesigning their characters and renders to fit modern sensibilities.

Option #1 could have been fun, but the question then becomes: which style? As much as I loved the look of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), I feel like its character designs only work because the focus is on their non-human characters. Its human character designs are a bit Disneyesque in their proportions and simplicity, which doesn't fit Shrek's caricature/realism style at all. Compare:

Adding new humans in that style would clash, and I think realistic humans in a bright, 'painterly' style wouldn't look great, either. The animation style also lends itself really well to its frequent action/fight sequences... something that Shrek has never really had. Another option would have been to create a third unique style for the Shrek franchise, but that could be quite risky - they'd be making it less cohesive, and they would risk locking themselves into a look that could age badly (personally, I bet that the 'painterly' style is going to end up being seen as very 'typical' for the 2020s!) or that they might not like anymore if they were to make more Shrek media later - more on that to come.

So, onto option #2, then: keep everything the same. That could work, but... at this point I'd like to invite you to imagine how uncanny the princesses would be when rendered in the same way as HTTYD3. The other Shrek films get away with it because, despite their human proportions, they still don't look real. This is an issue that videogames have had for years - the uncanny valley is very, very easy to fall into. I suspect that this is another part of the reason why Puss in Boots 2 chose to go for a whole new style for their human characters. (The Barbie franchise also went with a more generic big-eyes style as their renders got better.)

Besides, Shrek has actually changed quite a lot over time. Here's a comparison between Shrek (2001) and Shrek Forever After (2010) - the animation and render quality have massively improved, and I'm sure this is a different model:

While that second gif holds up pretty well, it'd look dated now, especially in a cinema (again, look at the HTTYD-HTTYD3 difference, and that was over 6 years ago). And besides, Shrek has always been known to push the envelope on animation technology, which brings us to option #3... actually follow the trend.

At that point, Shrek 5 undergoing the same fate as HTTYD3 feels entirely inevitable. Realistic skin, squishy animation, rounder character models...

...and, who can forget, a massive time skip that redesigns the characters now that it's been at least a decade since the last installment and they've got older kids? (Because, yes, there's a flash forward at the end of HTTYD3 that reveals the trilogy's events took place when Hiccup was still young, and that he has a kids now! And a beard!)

All of this - the aged-up characters, the slightly rounder designs, the toned-down textures, the squishy animation, the realistic renders - all combine to make something that is, at best, unfamiliar, and at worst, extremely uncanny.

Adding so much detail to the hair and environments, while removing detail from faces results in characters that look almost jelly-like. It reminds me a bit of the current 'dewy skin' make-up trend, which feels... entirely inappropriate for Shrek. It's hard for me to imagine those characters in Shrek's naturalistic, dirty world.

Additionally, it feels like a bit of a betrayal of the original Shrek, which was very much a dig at Disney. Its human/ogre characters have never been rounded and cutesy - they're either caricatured (like Fiona's parents, Farquaad, Rumpelstiltskin, etc.) or very realistic (like the princesses). (Though it should be noted that the Shrek franchise has become less subversive over time.)

So... what should they have done?

I'm not an animator or film tester, so I can't say for sure, but my Hot Take is that they should've made Shrek 5 back in 2016, when it was still a popular meme and they physically simply didn't have the technology to make him look like that.

Maybe we would even have had a Shrek 6 by now, and, like HTTYD2, Shrek 5 would've nicely bridged the gap and we wouldn't be complaining at all.

As the animator/youtuber Sir Wade Neistat put it: this may not just be a sequel, but a reboot - it's likely that they want to do more with Shrek after this, and they'll be looking to appeal to a new generation of kids, not just the old (nostalgic) fans. If this style is what modern kids want, they don't have much of a choice. While we don't know if they'll plan to do more with Shrek as a character, we do know that they're planning to release a Donkey spinoff in 2028, which will undoubtedly also influence Shrek 5's story and style. (I cannot recommend Sir Wade's video enough. He talks about style, the current state of the industry and other practical aspects. It's well worth it if you have 20 minutes to spare.)

As for what they'll actually do... I don't how they're going to respond, but they have plenty of time to figure it out. Animated films take years to develop as scripts/animatics, and then up to 2 years to fully animate. The first animated teaser came out in February 2025 with a release date of December 2026*, so it's very likely that the teaser was one of the first (or even only) things that had been fully animated at that point.

*Its current release date is June 2027 (instead of July 2026), because it was delayed twice. Contrary to popular belief, the first delay, in early 2025, was not in response to the teaser's reception - they actually announced the delay in January, a month before the teaser came out, giving Shrek 5's release slot to Minions 3 instead.** In August 2026, when everyone had stopped talking about it, they quietly delayed it for another 6 months again. Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) was only delayed 3 months for its redesign - though, of course, that was just one character.**DreamWorks Animation and Illumination are entirely separate studios, but they are currently both owned by Universal. When DWA was also acquired, it was decided that, between them, they would be allowed to release up to 4 films each year, hence being able to swap their release dates.

Animated films (well, really all films these days) go through a LOT of audience screenings from the time when production starts all the way up to release. They will be getting a lot of feedback; it's just a case of how they handle it.

I'm personally not going to speculate on the storyline, especially now that it's clear that DWA is taking more time to rethink it (for better or worse, Elio (2025) has already proven that you can entirely reinvent a film's story in a year), but I will say that sequels to franchises that already seemed to have a clear ending are hard to do. Shrek may have originally been planned to be a 5-film franchise, but I'd be very surprised if any of that original 5-story concept makes it in, given that it was supposed to be about Shrek's backstory. It'd be very funny if the whole film turned out to just be a story Shrek tells his children about his childhood, though...