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With 4,000 members of the press watching, Shrek's jubilantly received May 12 premiere generated enough ink to help kick its stature up from big-buzz American summer movie to potential global monster. And given the lucrative ancillary markets, the ogre's Granny Smith green skin may prove symbolic.

"Jeffrey likes to say, 'A hit animated feature is the gift that keeps on giving,'" says John Lithgow, who voices Shrek's nemesis, Lord Farquaad. "There's a new flotilla of kids every year. These things get amortized. They get reworked. The Lion King is one of the biggest hits on Broadway. So who knows?"

If the folks who made Shrek sound giddy now at the prospect of success, it's probably because their big green child was so difficult to birth. Redoing Myers' vocals was only the last of Shrek's behind-the-scenes hiccups. The 89-minute picture took five years to gestate, and even in the slow-as-paint-drying animation biz, that's protracted. The first two credited screenwriters to sign on, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who helped inject pop-culture riffs into Aladdin), say that on the way to a final script, they turned out 3,000 pages of material. They dropped out for a while at the three-year mark as Joe Stillman (Beavis and Butt-head Do America) and Roger S.H. Schulman (Balto) brought in other ideas. Among those circling the project early on was The Nightmare Before Christmas helmer Henry Selick; two other directors came and went before Katzenberg tapped feature first-timers Andrew Adamson, an effects expert (Batman & Robin), and animation vet Vicky Jenson.

The team's toughest bugaboo was fleshing out a simple children's book into something with more adult appeal. Among the rejects: parents (voiced by Happy Days' Marion Ross and Tom Bosley) who throw Shrek out of the house, and a meddlesome witch (Linda Hunt). Ever so gradually, Lithgow's Farquaad became the key villain. Farquaad hates fairy-tale creatures--messy peasants who ruin his vision of a "perfect" kingdom. Issuing an eviction notice, he makes refugees of such figures as Snow White and the seven dwarfs, Cinderella, Pinocchio, and the three little pigs. As this relocation-center concept took shape, the Shrek filmmakers set out to debunk the world according to Grimm, Disney, and other bedtime-story purveyors.

"I think there's some harm in the messages fairy tales have delivered," says Adamson. Tell a kid to "watch out for the witch, and you've got a kid scared of old women." He particularly disliked the finale of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. "I was disappointed when the Beast turned into that guy with long blond hair. If Belle had accepted him as a beast, that would have been much more powerful and interesting."

Shrek ultimately morphed into a de facto Beast rewrite, but with a satirical edge. Especially when it came to Dulac, Farquaad's spotless hometown--a village resembling a Disney-style theme park, right down to the cutesy parking-lot names and posted waiting times for attractions. But Katzenberg bristles at the notion that Shrek is anything more than a gentle ribbing. "Some journalist said, 'It seems like there's a [physical] likeness between Farquaad and Michael Eisner,'" Katzenberg reports. "That is the most absurd thing anybody has ever said." In fact, if Farquaad conjures anyone visually, it's Lithgow--or even the 5-foot-4-inch Katzenberg. According to scripter Elliott, "Farquaad is short because Jeffrey insisted he be short. So...I could postulate maybe it was Jeffrey making fun of himself. I think to some extent he's also making fun of who he had to be at Disney. He was the guy who coined the phrase, 'If you don't come into work on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday.' They called the place Mouschwitz. Jeffrey's very aware of that. And that's not how he functions at DreamWorks at all. He seems happier now, I have to say."

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