Shrek vs. Shrek 5: A comparison of character designs. Fans not happy with new versions of beloved characters
Shrek in the new installment of the series will change a bit, as will the rest of the beloved characters. We compare their new look with the old one.
The new announcement of Shrek 5, to be released in 2026, has stirred up a lot of emotions among fans of the green ogre and his friends. These emotions, for the most part, are negative, as many DreamWorks Animation fans can't get over the change in design of the series' characters that the studio decided on years later.
So let's take a look at how Shrek's characters look in the fifth installment of the series compared to the first. In the tease, Shrek, Donkey, Fiona, Pinocchio and Shrek and Fiona's daughter were shown, however, since she is a new character and whose look must have been drastically changed due to the fact that she was last seen as an infant, she can be excluded from the comparison. So let's focus on the other four: Shrek, Donkey, Fiona and Pinocchio.
Source: ownScreenshots: Shrek 5, Walt Dohrn and Conrad Vernon, DreamWorks Animation, 2026 / Shrek, Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, DreamWorks Animation, 2001
The characters are indeed different in Shrek 5 from what they looked like in the first installment or even the three that followed, where studio still relied on designs very similar to the initial ones. Now, however, there are drastic changes that have made Shrek's face slimmer and more expressive, Donkey is more “hairy,” Fiona is mostly the same, and Pinocchio looks both more innocent and older, which for a puppet can be surprising. Anyway, it can be said of all the characters that they look older, but this is the natural order of things that we have to accept – the heroes of our childhood, like us, grow older. And the age of time can be seen most clearly from the child of Shrek and Fiona, who went from being an infant to a teenager/young adult. And it's probably for this purpose that the daughter was placed in this preview.
The changes are certainly due to advances in technology, the studio has much more capabilities than it did more than 20 years ago, allowing the designs to be more refined (more detail on Donkey's coat). The studio's style has also changed, as was already evident in the latest Puss in Boots movie, where the Cat also looks a bit different from the Shrek movies.
Shrek fans on the web are expressing dissatisfaction with these changes, as can be seen, for example, under the announcement post on X, even comparing this situation to Sonic the Hedgehog, where the first character design in the new film series was also met with criticism – which in turn led to changes that make Sonic resemble himself from the games.
- “Too cerebral and over-reliant on technique.” Winner of 3 Oscars was Katharine Hepburn's “least favourite actress onscreen”
- “I was crying with laughter.” Christian Bale called “one of his tops” the 28-year-old film, which has only 16% on Rotten Tomatoes
- “Sort of asinine, sort of cliched, sort of unnecessary.” Morgan Freeman refused to film The Shawshank Redemption scene he described as “overkill”
- It went unnoticed, but Simon Helberg from The Big Bang Theory 3 years earlier played almost the same role in the Friends universe
- “How could you do something so fun and be so miserable.” Tom Hardy hated making this movie and has no intention of starring in a similar one