#Happy Labor Day to Shrek I guess
So, this scene is specifically a fuck off to famously anti-union Disney. But it goes beyond the dialogue. Look at Puss on Shrek's shoulders. Puss's movement is counter balancing Shrek's so that he stays up there. It's a lot of movement, a lot of animation, for a character who isn't talking. Every time they have to animate that feather in his hat, that's extra work, extra care, extra money, and that's just one element of the work, there. The animators could have chosen to put Puss on Donkey- look at Donkey's relatively small amount of movement compared to Shrek or Puss. But they didn't, they put him on Shrek's shoulders and they animated him. Why might they do this as a fuck-you to Disney? Well. Disney is not only anti-union, they are cheap as fuck. There's a lot of recycled rotoscoping in Disney movies in the 1970s because they were cheaping out on the process so they didn't have to pay rotoscopers. There are probably other examples, but, they recycle their own work a lot, and I assume most Tumblrinas have probably seen that video of the scenes from Robin Hood and Jungle Book and 101 Dalmations directly compared with scenes from Snow White and several animated cartoons that the rotoscoping was taken from. The reason that Don Bluth left Disney to start his own company (not Dreamworks, but, this is the example that I have) was because on The Rescuers, there were a lot of examples of the whites of eyes not being painted in- you can see it a LOT with Bernard, especially in action sequences. Don was told that the reason for this was that it was too expensive. He thought it looked like what it is, unprofessional and unfinished for a company that's allegedly got Disney money and Disney quality, so he went off and did the math and was like, "It doesn't cost shit." And Disney told him to shut up and stop colouring in the whites of the eyes. So he left. And you can see the kind of "needless" art he did in movies like The Land Before Time and The Secret of NIMH where there's a LOT of attention to detail in the art and in the animation.
We're seeing the same thing here with Shrek and Puss. While talking about union protections for union workers, in a nod intended to stick it to Disney, they are showing animators, "Look. We didn't need to animate this scene like this, you know this. But we did. We spent the money. We're pro union and we didn't cheap out."
