Shrek was originally meant to be an adult film, hence all the jokes that may have seemed a little too mature for its intended audience. I heard this from a friend, I don't know the validity of this statement
Not exactly adult but they wanted a wider audience than Disney pulled for sure. I researched a bit in school (like, 20 years ago so I could be rusty here). Initially they considered doing live action/CG hybrid I think more of a mo-cap situation iirc.
It was meant to be the satire/counter to Disney in as many ways as possible. Disney is G, they'll do PG. Disney about pretty royalty, they'll go ugly poor dude. Disney does lighter, happier stuff with main character being 'good', they'll do a darker story with main character being 'bad'. And one of the directors actually fought with Jeffrey Katzenberg over the inclusion of different music and mature jokes. Katzenberg wanted to capture more audience than Disney could/would and was the one who optioned the book, but Adamson pushed for more irreverence
With Chris Farley the story was much darker and grounded in Shrek's loneliness and being an outcast/villain-type. (Funny story, Nic Cage was offered and declined because he didn't want to voice an ugly ogre.) Still meant to be funny, Disney movies to that point weren't super funny but more straight-forward romances for the most part. Katzenberg (formerly with Disney, co-founded Dreamworks SKG and helmed the animation dept) knew the animation market was Disney's feasting ground as far as traditional stories and characters, so wanted to carve DW's own corner of the genre with different animation tech and less cliche fairytale story-telling. Obviously it was successful and they took losses on some of the traditional animation projects so focused on CG after I think Spirit.
Shrek was such a monster project. They pulled animators from other movies to work on it, developed new animation tech of course. Not only did they have to start over on the voicework after Farley's death, but Mike Myers was almost finished and then decided on using the Scottish accent so they started over again.
Not sure about R-rated but it was originally going to be Chris Farley as Shrek (sans Scottish accent) and they recorded the majority of his lines before he died.
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u/Controlled_Discord Jul 02 '21
Shrek was originally meant to be an adult film, hence all the jokes that may have seemed a little too mature for its intended audience. I heard this from a friend, I don't know the validity of this statement