Shrek was nearly voiced by Chris Farley and made with motion capture
Before Mike Myers gave the ogre his Scottish accent, Chris Farley had recorded most of Shrek's lines, and the studio planned to animate the film through motion capture. Both plans collapsed. The 2001 result took $494.3 million worldwide and won the very first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
The story began with a children's picture book. William Steig published Shrek! in 1990, and Steven Spielberg bought the rights in 1991, imagining a hand-drawn version with Bill Murray as the ogre and Steve Martin as Donkey. Producer John H. Williams, whose kindergartner loved the book, persuaded him to move it to the new DreamWorks, and Jeffrey Katzenberg put it into active development in November 1995. Farley died in 1997 before finishing his recordings, so Myers took over; poor test results then killed the motion-capture approach, and Pacific Data Images built the final computer animation.
Early concept art from 1996 and 1997 looked very different. Shrek lived in a rubbish dump called Wart Creek, near humans, and one draft had him sharing a home with his parents and keeping rotting fish in his bedroom. Donkey was modelled on Pericles, a real miniature donkey from Palo Alto. Supervising animator Raman Hui made more than 100 sculptures of Fiona before the directors settled on her look, and a magnolia plantation in Charleston inspired the swamp. Nicolas Cage had declined the lead, unwilling to be seen as an ogre.
Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio spent two years on the script from 1997, building each lead character around an unhealthy response to low self-esteem. When the studio drifted towards making Shrek a gentle soul misjudged for his looks, they fought to keep him a misanthrope. Co-director Andrew Adamson clashed with Katzenberg over adult humour; Katzenberg wanted to reach grown-ups too but found proposals such as Guns N' Roses on the soundtrack too much. Vicky Jenson replaced Kelly Asbury as co-director, and the pair split the film in half.
The finished film mocks fairy tale adaptations, chiefly Disney's. It premiered in Westwood on April 22, 2001, then competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the first animated film in the main competition since 1980. It became the fourth highest-grossing film of that year, gave DreamWorks Animation a real rival to Pixar, and in 2020 became the first animated film of this century chosen for the National Film Registry.
Source: Shrek
