These 14 Secrets About Shrek Will Warm Any Ogre’s Heart

For years, Shrek was considered the ugly stepchild of the DreamWorks empire. 

The way director Andrew Adamson saw it, company co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg “was going through his ‘I want to make serious animation for adults,'” Adamson recently told Inverse. And the flatulent, anti-social, cantankerous AF ogre didn’t exactly fit the bill. “This was sort of a bastard child,” Adamson continued. “It was the island of misfit toys to a large degree. Everyone who didn’t work out on another project got sent onto Shrek.”

Agreed editor Sim Evan-Jones, “There was always a little bit of a rebel spirit about the Shrek gang. There was a shared empathy that everyone wanted to do things in an unconventional way.”

So they kept plugging away, writing their crude jokes and perfecting their computer-generated animation. And when Katzenberg saw the finished project—in which a repugnant ogre joins a wise-cracking donkey on a quest to save a princess in a send-up of every animated movie that came before it—he was a believer. 

“We had one screening where we’d scored something really high,” Adamson recalled. “And I remember Jeffrey saying to me afterward, ‘Get ready for this. This may only happen once in your life.'”