National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

DreamWorks Animation released Shrek in May 2001, marking a turning point for computer-animated features and challenging Disney's long dominance of the fairy-tale genre. Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, the film earned the first-ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and demonstrated that irreverent, layered storytelling could find enormous audiences. Its cultural footprint has only grown in the decades since.

This cell, titled Shrek and Big Bad Wolf, captures a quiet interior moment between the two characters amid warm torchlight and stone surroundings — part of the film's memorable gathering of displaced fairy-tale creatures. Pulled from 35mm, the three consecutive frames preserve a single sustained instant from that scene, offering a tangible fragment of one of animation's landmark productions.