Lego Shrek Minifigs are the Final Victory for Haters of Realistic CGI

Lego Shrek Minifigs are the Final Victory for Haters of Realistic CGI

Finally, an Ogre who isn’t hard on the eyes.

Listen, we know a lot of you out there love Shrek. And to be fair, it’s a wonderful film about how beauty is only skin deep. But we have to be honest with you: It’s not just the ogre that is mildly unsettling to look at in the original movie. The “graphics” (if you will) in the original Shrek reach for heights that they just can’t grasp. Not only does the title character look a little gross—which isn’t an insult, it’s the intended central theme of the movie!—but so do the “regular” people, too.

That’s because Shrek was first released in 2001, when the animation world had first begun to leave behind traditional hand-drawn techniques in favor of CGI. But no one was sure yet if polygon-based visuals could be used for more than just stories about toys and the lives of bugs. Believe it or not, even Jar Jar Binks (the first fully-CGI supporting character in a live-action movie) was initially met with a mixed response. How wude!

But the idea was still there that, eventually, computer graphics would become fully realistic. There was an urge for CGI animated movies to step out of their proverbial swamp and venture into the larger world of storytelling. People wondered: Could animated movies be about regular people like you and me, if only they were fancy enough? Could they even be (gasp) “cinema”? Just as Shrek acted like he didn’t care that the world shunned him while secretly wanting love and acceptance, animated films have long wondered if they could ever transform into real boys and girls, too, or if they’d always be seen as glorified puppet shows.

And despite looking a bit plasticly, porous, and generally unnatural, Shrek and its cast of somewhat-human-looking people managed to do just that. It was a huge hit, and was followed by three sequels, two spin-off movies, and a handful of TV specials, not to mention video games, stage plays, Halloween costumes, and countless toys. For a time, it established the idea that CGI movies could aspire for some semblance of visual realism and still be accepted.

That said, Shrek may have won the battle of “uncanny valley polygon people”, but as a whole, that side of animation art direction lost the war. As technology advanced, realism retreated. Unless it’s a Disney “live action” remake of The Lion King, or something that elicits uncanny horror like The Polar Express, modern animated movies almost always go for stylized characters that look more like toys, sculptures, or 3D caricature portraits than they do photorealistic humans. The art directors on 2022’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (the second of those Shrek spin-offs) explicitly stated that they wanted the movie to look more like a painting than real life. And the movie did great! We can guess that Shrek 5, co-starring Zendaya, will take similar steps towards stylization.

But the biggest sign that the Shrek series has finally given up on realism comes from its new line of Lego Minifigs. Lego, as you may know, now has the capacity to offer more realistic head molds for its minifigs. Everyone from Homer Simpson to, yes, Jar Jar Binks has received increasingly detailed head molds over the years. One would expect that if Shrek were still trying to sell us on his detailed skin textures and realistically receding gumline, that his creators would have opted for a custom face sculpt that sat somewhere between Homer’s and Jar Jar’s.

But no, the big green flatulent ogre has finally gone flat and cute, just like the 2D cartoons he sought to usurp back in 2001. He and his lady wife Fiona have unique, protruding ears, extra big heads, and exaggeratedly expressive eyes, noses, and mouths. But their facial features are as flat and iconographically adorable as one could ask for. Pinocchio is represented here too, in all his puppety glory, with a face that seems perpetually shocked that this is what his life has become. Or maybe he’s just astonished by how good those ogres look.

Out of the whole 12-figure set (which includes an amorous dragon and her beloved Donkey, a talking gingerbread man with the cold dead eyes of a shark, and the always charming Puss in Boots), it’s the Big Bad Wolf in his grandma disguise that comes the closest to realism. All the human characters, including the previously repulsive-looking Lord Farquaad and the not-actually-charming Prince Charming actually do look charming now that their features have been boiled down to just eyes, eyebrows, and mouths. It only took 25 years, but Shrek and the gang have finally found a way to still look like themselves, shiny and plasticky to a fault, while also looking good at the same time.