After three successful films, billions of dollars in gross revenue and a slew of movie-based clothing and other memorabilia, the popular animated franchise Shrek looks to find its way to people across the world one last time.
The final film of the series, “Shrek Forever After,” is slated for release Friday in theaters across the country.
Mike Myers will be reprising the role of Shrek, Eddie Murphy returns as Donkey and Cameron Diaz voices Princess Fiona.
In addition to other returning characters and voices, the final film has some new additions, such as Walt Dohrn playing Rumpelstiltskin, one of the film’s key antagonists.
“I really got to learn a lot from all those actors,” said Dohrn, who has been working on Shrek in other ways besides voicing since the second film. “It was the greatest honor to be able to play a villain for them.”
Dohrn was able to land the voice of Rumpelstiltskin through his work with the movie.
“As I helped write and develop the character with director, I started doing the temporary scratch vocals,” Dohrn said. “The crew and the studio started falling in love with the voice and Jeffrey Katzenberg decided it was irreplaceable.”
In addition of his work with the Shrek films, Dohrn has done behind-the-scenes work with popular children’s cartoons such as “SpongeBob SquarePants” and Cartoon Network’s “Dexter’s Laboratory.” He also worked on the animation side for the film “Madagascar.” This is the first significant voice role of Dohrn’s career.
“What happened with Rumpel was that it wasn’t just impersonating someone, it was really kind of developing the role and finding the specific voice,” Dohrn said. “That was the difference between the voices I used to do, the impersonations, to really discovering the character.”
The plot for the new film continues with the strong theme of fairy tales that has been seen in the previous three films. After being tricked into signing an agreement with Rumpelstiltskin, Shrek is sent into a parallel universe where ogres are the villains, Rumpelstiltskin is king of the land of Far Far Away, and Shrek and Fiona have never met.
Although the film will be released this Friday, reviews for the movie have been mixed so far. Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter said, “It may finally be time to let Shrek and Fiona live happily ever after.” Although David Pollard of Movie City News called the film, “Easily, the best sequel in the series.”
