I could understand it if computer animation had been specifically designed to desensitize the human race to thought and feeling; instead, it's supposed to give us pleasure. "Shrek," based on a well-loved children's book by William Steig, has plenty going for it: The story of a fat, cranky, green ogre with no social skills, it has a rough-and-tumble jauntiness that's often hard to resist. It's good-natured with just enough wiseass crackle about it (and not in the glossified, milk-safe Disney way). The ogre Shrek (Mike Myers) lives alone, quite happily, in his own private swamp, until his solitude is shattered by a noisy, restless troupe of fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme characters who've been forced from their homes by the nasty Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow), who, with his Prince Valiant haircut and long, squared-off jaw, resembles nothing so much as a cartoon-world version of Laurence Olivier's Richard III.

After begrudgingly accepting the friendship of one of the refugees, the eminently polite but straight-talking Donkey (Eddie Murphy), Shrek travels to Farquaad's kingdom to see what he can do about repatriating the fairy-tale squatters. Farquaad agrees to help if Shrek will travel to a far-off kingdom to rescue Fiona (Cameron Diaz), the princess Farquaad has decided to take for his bride. (He chose her from a "Dating Game"-style lineup, complete with that show's music and pop-art daisy motifs, presented to him via a magic mirror.)

There's clearly an intelligent, intuitive sensibility behind Shrek: In a pivotal scene, when Shrek and his true love are separated, their feelings of despair and isolation are played out against John Cale's version of Leonard Cohen's crestfallen anthem "Hallelujah." It's both surprisingly offbeat and touching. Beyond that, the screenwriters of "Shrek," Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman and Roger S.H. Schulman, revel in joyous, kid-friendly perversity, giving us stock fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme characters who behave in ways we'd never expect. It's impossible not to laugh as the Gingerbread Man, two of his little baked legs cruelly broken off at the knee, scowls like a hard-boiled gangster at Farquaad, who's captured him in the hopes of gleaning information about the renegade storybook characters.

	Shrek Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson With the voices of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, John Lithgow View the "Shrek" movie trailer RealVideo 56k | 200k Print story E-mail story

Details like that are inventive and fun, but they're not nearly enough to melt the candy-hard veneer that coats "Shrek." The picture presents itself as a naughty court jester ready to thumb its nose gleefully at just about anything: There are gross earwax jokes, as well as gentle little pokes at every bit of fairy-tale movie lore from "Babe" to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

But "Shrek" rides high on its state-of-the-art technique, to the point where its showy self-satisfaction throws us out of the story instead of fully engaging us with the characters. We're invited to marvel at the fact that we can practically count the bristly brown hairs on Donkey's back -- but what the heck are we doing, thinking about counting hairs? The techno-sophistication of "Shrek" cuts right through the picture's goofy, pleasingly homespun demeanor like a laser, resulting in something that smells a lot like disingenuousness; we're left feeling self-righteously hip and knowing, and worse yet, we've almost been convinced that's a suitable substitute for enchantment.

Maybe enchantment doesn't come cheap. But is it that much more expensive than extravagant smugness? According to the press materials, "Shrek" avails itself of a DreamWorks "proprietary" facial animation system (first used in "Antz") that uses a layering process to build the image of a character's face, starting with the skull and then gradually adding computer re-creations of muscles and skin. The image is wired with hundreds of controls to allow for an almost limitless number of facial expressions, not to mention realistic lip-syncing.

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