HIGH-TECH 'SHREK' BRINGING THE FAIRY-TALE OGRE TO LIFE WASN'T CHILD'S PLAY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Computer animation finally comes out of the toy box and leaps past the anthill with ``Shrek,'' opening Wednesday.

The fifth all-digital feature film - following the two ``Toy Story'' films, ``Antz'' and ``A Bug's Life'' - includes, among other computer- generated wonders previously unseen on the big screen, a cast of thousands of higher mammals, 36 mostly naturalistic locations and several human (or, in the case of the title ogre, humanoid) characters with more realistic features and wider expressive ranges than ever before.

It's also got a talking donkey and parodies of everything from ``The Three Little Pigs'' to the World Wrestling Federation and ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.'' All of which makes for one of the movie year's most intensive collisions of high technology and commercial consideration - with, perhaps, something on the order of artistry thrown in.

Indisputably, ``Shrek'' represents a new high point in the labor-intensive field of CG feature-making - until ``Final Fantasy,'' the video game adaptation featuring virtual near-humans, comes out in a couple of months, anyway. But maybe even then ...

``From a technological point of view, it's always hard to say what's new and groundbreaking and what's a natural progression from things that have been done before,'' notes Andrew Adamson, a New Zealand visual effects expert who, with veteran animation artist Vicky Jenson, makes his feature co-directing debut on ``Shrek.''

``Each CG movie has gone a little further than the one before,'' Adamson says. ``But I do think we've made a catapulting leap this time. We set out to tackle things that were more difficult. You always go into a project like this not knowing how you're going to do half of what you want to achieve, but knowing that your last project was the same way and you somehow managed to achieve it.''

Adapted from William Steig's slim children's book, ``Shrek'' tells the story of a happily anti-social ogre whose world is rocked when his smelly swamp is suddenly overrun by cute and annoying fairy tale creatures. They're refugees from a neighboring kingdom whose pint-size ruler, Lord Farquaad, has banished them in an effort to cleanse his realm of riff-raff.

Shrek demands Farquaad get the fairies, blind mice and other undesirables off of his turf; the tiny tyrant agrees to if Shrek rescues Princess Fiona from a dragon's castle so Farquaad can marry her.

The ensuing quest involves the aforementioned, motor-mouthed Donkey, an unlikely but growing affection between the ogre and the damsel, and assorted smart-aleck riffs on traditional fairy tale conventions.

Mike Myers, who was brought in following the death of the originally cast Chris Farley, provides the voice of Shrek. Eddie Murphy does similar duty for sidekick Donkey, Cameron Diaz for Fiona and John Lithgow for Lord F. ``Shrek'' was made by Pacific Data Images, the Palo Alto-based, digital animation outfit that made ``Antz'' for DreamWorks and is now a subsidiary of the Steven Spielberg-Jeffrey Katzenberg-David Geffen-owned studio. It was, in every way, shape and form, a challenge to pull off from beginning to end - but also, according to those who made it, an ongoing joy.

``In 'Shrek,' we had a bigger world,'' Adamson notes. ``A lot of the movies prior to this had small creatures dealing with a relatively small world, which was very sensible because it was a more contained space and more doable. In this, we had a quest, characters who were more human, many different locations in an outside world where you can kind of see forever ... so we definitely had to tackle a lot of things, just from a story point of view.''

Like, to begin with, a story.

``William Steig's story is very basic,'' says Jenson, whose traditional, hand-drawn animation credits range from TV's ``Ren & Stimpy'' to the features ``Ferngully'' and DreamWorks' ``The Road to El Dorado.'' ``What we kept was the attitude; it was the story of a big, stinky ogre who was happy in his own ways and his world, who sort of hated anything pretty or cute and goes off in search of the perfect woman.

``We had to develop a plot, get him out of his swamp so he could encounter other characters. One thing we had experimented with was burning his home down. We had Lord Farquaad beautifying the whole countryside in his quest for perfection, and of course that set Shrek off with a tremendous amount of intent and motivation. But it kind of wasn't very funny, it was sort of too dark.

``As part of that story line, he met some fairy tale creatures who were being exiled along his way, and that was so fun we decided to push that even more and drive him out by dumping them all in Shrek's swamp.''

The princess-rescue concept naturally grew from that idea - and provided ``Shrek's'' techno/animation team with what was arguably its biggest challenge. While the big green ogre, expressive as he may be, had a certain amount of subjective wiggle room in how he was presented, and the Napoleonic Lord Farquaad could buyably fall back on diminutive caricature, Fiona had to be as beautifully and emotionally human as computer programs could make her. And, along with that, she had to be presented in a way that would mesh with the rest of ``Shrek's'' stylized fantasy world.

``We set up character deformation and motion systems that actually started by modeling the skeleton for the character,'' explains visual-effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg, an 11-year Pacific Data Images veteran.

``Even though we never actually rendered bones, the programmers started with that, then they modeled and built muscles on top of that. A fat layer was applied after that, then a skin layer and, finally, a clothing layer. Believe me, a lot of trial and error went into that. Obviously, the needs for humans were much greater than the needs for insect creatures.''

By basing the system on actual human musculature and skin properties, they came up with one convincing, visually articulate princess. But there was something wrong.

``Mostly with what we call her textures,'' Bielenberg says, ``What we painted with the computer had become a bit too photo-realistic. Her face had too many pores and blemishes, that sort of thing, so we had to dial that back, just to keep her within what we called the stylized realism of the movie.''

And that was just one character. Everything seen in the movie had to be designed and then rendered, in bits and bytes, from scratch. Production designer James Hegedus, working on his first animated film after art-directing stints on the likes of ``Mars Attacks!'' and ``Batman Forever,'' found CG's capacity to reproduce his visions practically verbatim exhilarating - and the amount of work that went into achieving that exhausting.

``It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,'' Hegedus says, chuckling. ``My concern was to make sure that everything in the film existed in the same visual reality. If a shape is out of proportion or out of scale, you lose that sense of stylized realism. If you go too cartoony, if your lighting is off, if your paints and textures seem strange, if it doesn't look like there's enough gravity in the animation ... the whole thing just doesn't weave together.

``But, personally, I felt like that screen image was my own canvas, because of what the medium is capable of doing.''

Just who is Shrek?

Rumors have been popping up that the character of Shrek has been snarkishly designed to resemble Michael Eisner, the CEO of DreamWorks' arch-rival Walt Disney Co. (and resented former boss of Katzenberg, who now oversees DreamWorks' animation output).

Or was the towering Eisner supposed to be skewered in venal little Lord Farquaad? That's been reported, too.

``In all honesty, I have no idea where those things came from,'' co-director Andrew Adamson says. ``There was no modeling on anyone. But one thing I will say is that, for the behavior of Farquaad, we did use a movie executive as our model, but that was based on Kevin Spacey's character in 'Swimming With Sharks.' And, you know, we have no shortage of studio executives around to draw from.

``But the look of Shrek was taken after the design in the book - the ears, the cowl, all of that. He only went through a remodel after Mike Myers became associated with the project, when we added Mike's impish eyebrows.''

The Disney empire did not get off scot-free, though. When Shrek and Donkey first travel to Farquaad's capital, Du Lac, they find a soullessly immaculate, medieval fantasy realm devoid of organic soul ... but rich in roped-off waiting lines.

``In trying to develop Du Lac into this sort of artificial reality, this environment that's just so hyper-controlled, there were a couple of models that we could go for,'' co-director Vicky Jenson explains. ``We went way back to old, Utopian examples of what cities were supposed to look like, fascist architecture. ... But there are two examples in our culture: One was theme parks, where everything's controlled and people run around scooping up bird poop and gum the minute it drops, and the other was Las Vegas, where everything is a fake facade. Well, kids don't know Vegas all that well, and the other one just seemed suited to our fairy tale world.''

As satiric as ``Shrek'' may be, its directors hope that it will also establish a new magic kingdom all its own.

``This movie has a more independent feel to it, a tone that's a little more irreverent and fun than, maybe, some animated movies,'' Adamson reckons. ``But at its heart was a real theme that I related to. Thematically, at its core, it's about not judging things by surface stereotypes.

``And then, under all of those, about having a really good laugh,'' Adamson concludes.

- Bob Strauss

CAPTION(S):

5 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Working ogre-time

`Shrek's' makers push computer animation a giant step forward

(2 -- 3) In ``Shrek,'' a not-so-jolly green giant (voiced by Mike Myers) must rescue a princess; animators embarked on similarly challenging journeys as they harnessed new computer technology for the film.

(4) MYERS

(5) Talking `bout my computer generation: the stars of ``Shrek''

Box: Just who is Shrek? (see text)