useful info from a review

mostly fed on watered-down Golden Book renditions and, of course, bright, happy Disney translations. Beauty and goodness win, ugliness and evil don't, and the world is full of magical, mysterious creatures -- from elves and dwarves to fairy godmothers and Tinkerbells -- all ready and willing to serve us superior humans. And once we're old enough to realize what a line we've been fed, we give up and go to Disney World, hoping to recapture a bit of that naive magic,

It doesn't take long for kids to tire of the simplistic retellings of fairy tales we're bombarded with in our formative years -- few of us have actually read the dark and gruesome Brothers Grimm versions, after all, and so we're mostly fed on watered-down Golden Book renditions and, of course, bright, happy Disney translations. Beauty and goodness win, ugliness and evil don't, and the world is full of magical, mysterious creatures -- from elves and dwarves to fairy godmothers and Tinkerbells -- all ready and willing to serve us superior humans. And once we're old enough to realize what a line we've been fed, we give up and go to Disney World, hoping to recapture a bit of that naive magic, but instead we just get sick riding Space Mountain a dozen times in a row.

So here we have Shrek, born out of that precise mindset: the one that longs for the just world fairy tales reassure us exists while recognizing that that place is hopelessly idealistic.
its heart an entirely conventional fairy tale: beauty and goodness do win in the end, and ugliness and evil don't. Shrek, for all his green skin and trumpetlike ears, is really quite a cute and goodhearted ogre, and Farquaad is indeed an ugly little toad of a man, inside and out.

http://www.flickfilosopher.com/blog/2001/05/shrek_review.html