Shrek the Third

Here we have another third installment in another series. There have been a lot of thirds this year. Anyway, this one, like most of the other ones I've seen, was cute, but not exceptional. I think the main problem was that it just didn't come together very well; it was more like sketch comedy than a single unified movie. Just look at the storyline and you'll see what I mean: Fiona's father dies, leaving the kingdom to Shrek unless he can line up another official heir to take over. Luckily, there IS an official heir because Shrek doesn't want the job, so Shrek sets off to find him. Seems kind of forced, but they could go somewhere with this. So far so good, yes? It kind of goes downhill from there. We have: the return of Charming, who wants his revenge, hijinks with the less-than-impressive alternate heir (his name is Arthur, which should basically explain to you the entire nature of the jokes revolving around his character), a bunch of fairytale princesses running around inside the castle, and Shrek ruminating over the fact that Fiona is pregnant and he is going to be a father soon. It's too much! Any one of those ideas would have made an entire movie all on its own, and all of them were crammed together. Given, they did some fun things with each plot and the whole story does manage to get wrapped up, but it just wasn't as much fun as it might have been if they'd stuck with one idea. Adding to the jarringly disjointed plot was a slight weirdness with the animation. Now, this isn't a major issue by far (in fact other people may not notice it), but it was pretty obvious they did the faces of human characters using a different method than they used for body animation. I think they did one of those tricks where they put sensors on the actual humans face to get much more realistic expressions, but the result is that the quality of the animation on the face doesn't quite match the animation on the body. One is very realistic, the other much less so. I'd say, stick with Ratatouille.