"Shrek"

There's no getting around that the characters in "Shrek" sure look real, in a 3-D model kind of way. (They resemble moving versions of those old View Master storybook reels featuring movable puppets, with the significant difference that you don't get a headache from looking at them for too long.) The characters move naturally, and their expressions make them look almost like live actors -- even if you've never particularly wanted your cartoons to look like a hyperreal version of reality, you've got it now.

But no matter how realistically these characters move or blink or smile, there's always a coldness about them, particularly around the eyes, that makes them a little spooky. Fiona even has two little frecklelike beauty spots, one on her cheek and one on her upper chest. They're symbols of her human authenticity, but they also serve as a sort of factory trademark left by her creators: "You see, we've thought of every last detail."

The hyperrealism of computer animation begs another question: If your goal is to make things look as realistic as possible, why bother with animation at all? One of the great pleasures of animation is the way it distills movement and color and sound into their simplest outlines; at its best, it gives us as much information as we need and no more. Our minds are left free to connect the dots, to fill in the minute spaces between the lines.

"Shrek," on the other hand, gives us too much. And yet with so many tools at their disposal, and with so much skill at their command, the animators of "Shrek" haven't graced us with anything particularly memorable. Walt Disney with his early shorts of singing and dancing bunnies or skeletons; Tim Burton with his Jack Skellington and Sally in "The Nightmare Before Christmas"; Nick Park with his man-and-dog team in "Wallace and Gromit" and his prisoner-fowl in "Chicken Run"; Chuck Jones with just about anything -- there's a long and varied list of individuals who have imbued cartoon characters with bottomless expressiveness without the help of anything as sophisticated as DreamWorks' Express-o-matic (or whatever it's called). Why do we need it now?

There are certainly plenty of creative uses for computer technology in animation: Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "South Park" characters may look crudely animated, but the jumble of construction-paper textures that make up the images is actually computer generated. And Brad Bird's "The Iron Giant" effectively uses a mix of computer animation and traditional, 2-D animation.

"The Iron Giant" is a story about a friendship between a (2-D) boy and a (computer-animated) robot. We identify most readily, of course, with the boy -- 2-D implies warmth and roundness so strongly that we believe in them wholeheartedly. The robot, on the other hand, is cold and mysterious at first, but that's just because it takes a while for us to get to know him. "The Iron Giant" is a sweet story by itself, but it's also something of a parable about the risks of fearing technology without trying to understand it.

And technology, of course, is the thing that makes a picture like "Shrek" possible. I don't underestimate the amount of care and work that goes into any animated feature, computer generated or otherwise. But "Shrek" is a switch-flipper of a movie: It repeatedly tries to toggle that little lever in all of us that generates a glow of awe and appreciation.

Mechanically, at least, the approach works. I know how hard the animators worked on "Shrek"; I saw it in every frame, and in every subtly shaded donkey hair. But I left the characters behind in the movie theater, like discarded and suddenly lifeless puppets, instead of dancing all the way home with them. I didn't have any desire to whisk them away with me. They look too much like work, and not enough like magic.

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