Film Theory: Shrek's Donkey was SECRETLY a Human! (Shrek Movie)

and now I'll wake her up with the name of true love's kiss and I want to kiss sleeping women it's a federal crime but she's my only true love Joe Olivia welcome my true love's kiss tell it to the judge you crawl look at the crown Hello Internet, welcome to

film

theory

. the show that turns your favorite bedtime stories into nightmare fuel, today we're diving back into the Shrek franchise because I honestly wanted to do something in an animated

movie

, but I didn't feel like writing another prediction

theory

for Frozen, and Shrek It's good, it's always relevant, and I've been thinking a lot about the franchise thanks in large part to the excellent analysis videos on the Schaefer Ellis Productions channel, which if you've never heard of makes amazing videos analyzing all kinds of classic animated

film

s, but further. about him and his work later, so what more is there to say about Trek almost 20 years after it was first released?

How about we finally put a definitive solution behind the mysterious origins of its most iconic character? I mean, as most of you know Shrek. The universe is full of characters from fairy tales and nursery rhymes who, when the film begins, are arrested and handed over to receive a reward. All the famous fairy tale characters are her Seven Dwarfs, the three bears, Tinkerbell, keyless, Oh, a talking

donkey

, three blind mice, but. in the words of Sesame Street, but one of these things just doesn't belong here, a talking

donkey

, have you ever stopped to think about that? I mean, all of these other fairy tale characters are super famous and easily recognizable, even generic characters like witches and ogres and princesses trapped in towers are tropes from countless other fairy tales, but a talking donkey, of course? where is?

My loyal theorists, the question we explore today is what is the origin of Shrek the donkey because I believe I have an answer that is demonstrable. beyond all reasonable doubt and let's just say that the conclusion of this one does not give us a happily ever after ending if you look in the fairy tale Lord there is actually only one famous talking donkey to notice the main character in the fairy tale of the brothers Grimm, the donkey. It's not something most people know about, but it basically goes something like this: a rich king and queen are upset because they can't have a child, but one day God blesses the couple and suddenly she gives birth to a son. donkey that wants to kill.

It's because you know, don't do it, but the King refuses and the couple raises him as their son, so we have a donkey that learns to talk and have manners, he even teaches himself to play music and this is starting to sound a lot. like our donkey from Shrek, he speaks English, sings all the time, could have pretty decent table manners when he needs them, and is one of the few fairy tale characters who knows the way to Lord Farquaad's castle, suggesting a possible true story, who knows where it is. The Farquaad guy is, oh yeah, I'm really funny, anyone else?

Thats not all. There is a really suspicious quote from the fairy tale that seems to encapsulate this, as our donkey quote: The young lord once went out for a walk full of thoughts and came to a well. He looked at it and in the mirror of clear water he saw the shape of his donkey. He was so distraught about it that he went out into the wide world and only took with him a faithful companion, a faithful traveling companion. It's an especially strange detail in this fairy tale. Include him because that's all we hear about this other mysterious character, but using context, we can clearly identify him as someone who is a loner and who is also comfortable traveling with a donkey, which points to someone like Shrek.

This is absolutely the origin story. for our talking donkey, isn't it? Until you get to the big twist at the end of the story, you see the donkey and his companion go to another kingdom and befriend the king who marries his daughter to the donkey because You know the donkey is depressed You know times were different back then So Okay, anyway, just as the donkey and his bride are about to celebrate their wedding night, the donkey takes off his skin to reveal himself as a real boy. King doesn't believe. So the next night he sneaks into his daughter's room and observes the process.

There are many reasons why you weren't told this at story time at night or reasons why people don't choose to adapt Grimm's Fairy Tales accurately, anyway, let's just say the king is impressed with which sees all the old men in the story die and the donkey gets a wife and two kingdoms, but you can start to see our problem when it comes to this theory, right? The donkey in the fairy tale is not a real donkey, it's just a

human

disguised inside the skin of a donkey, but one look at the offspring of donkeys and dragons and Shrek the Third is all the proof we need that the Shrek's donkey is one hundred percent donkey and zero percent

human

, those are drawn keys and dongjun. there's no doubt about it, so grimm's donkey out of the picture, we're back to square one, which honestly sucks because that would have been the best title and miniature ever, which means a return to the drawing board , so we know that the donkey is a fairy tale. character, otherwise he wouldn't be corralled with everyone else or deserve any kind of reward, so is he just made up for the purposes of these

movie

s or could there be another explanation for what really happened here two years ago in In a post On Reddit's now-deleted website, a user named Year Me Vee proposed a different possibility that the donkey came from a fairy tale, in fact, one that is much more popular than Grimm's.

The donkey was once good. The donkey is one of the kidnapped children from Tokyo. It is possible that the donkey began as a human child, stolen from the streets and sent to Pleasure Island, where, like so many others before him, he would be transformed into a donkey and eventually sold into slavery. It's not true that it's a pretty dark backstory for a main character in a R-rated franchise about an ogre who farts a lot, but it would help explain why in a movie full of celebrity cameos from the most famous fairy tales. emblematic of the story we would spend so much time with a talking donkey that would otherwise be out of place and the reason here is not simply to throw up your arms and say well, they are practically the only other notable fairy tale donkeys, so he must be one of them.

The clues pointing towards a Shrek Pinocchio crossover are ogres like onions. Oh dammit. They have layers, onions have layers, you get it, so let's start peeling them back first, look at the few details we can actually learn about the donkey's backstory based on some of the things he says throughout the movies. He says this on Shrek, the third nauseous record. For memories of underpants and swirls, as Puss in Boots points out moments later, donkeys don't wear clothes, so this would suggest that the donkey was a human at some point in its life as a child, how else would they have given a donkey underpants? they don't wear clothes, but human children do or at least they're supposed to know that naked babies scream around here later and that's a movie where a donkey and a cat swap bodies and we have this brief conversation, but maybe we are very played. for the best, oh, you will learn to control that this seems to suggest that the donkey learned to talk like a donkey later in life.

I mean, after all, who can remember what it's like to learn to talk as a baby if the donkey were a school-age child? who became a donkey and Pleasure Island; However, he would remember how difficult it was to speak normally after his transformation and how, when it first happened, his normal speech patterns began to be interrupted by the uncontrollable donkey Bray and wouldn't you know it? It's not just me speculating here, it's exactly what we see happen in Pinocchio, when we see the wick of a lamp transform into Pleasure Island, we see two key things: one, that he is able to continue speaking like a human despite being completely transformed into a donkey and his normal speech begins to be interrupted with donkey noises, in fact, based on the scenes, we learn an additional detail: children who transform into donkeys but can still speak fluently are sent back to Pleasure Island for a little longer until they completely lose that.

Skillfully, this scene also demonstrates another key feature of how the donkeys are treated on Pleasure Island: they are allowed to keep their clothes until they are ready to be sold in the salt mines. Here we see a child who has gone crazy. clothes from him by the coachman and sent to the checkout where, like Alexander, our boy from before can now stay dressed, this is important because the donkey in Shrek clearly has memories of being a donkey and wearing clothes. These donkeys are still allowed to wear clothes. it just opens up the possibility of being called a donkey chubby drawers, we know that Pleasure Island is specifically full of bullies, all the kids are trapped there because they misbehave, so the other half turned into a kid making fun of donkey for being scared and totally dirtying their donkey drawers. within the realm of possibility here and lastly, it probably goes without saying, but it's definitely worth noting that it's clearly established that both Pinocchio and Shrek share the same universe, heck, the first time we see a donkey, it's behind Pinocchio in line, could DreamWorks be your way? to slyly suggest that the two characters are linked maybe maybe not, but at least it verifies that the walk is based on Pinocchio lore, so it would make a lot of sense for a Pleasure Island donkey to be walking somewhere in This world, so the Pleasure Island Theory gives us a source of donkeys who wear clothes that used to be human and have learned to talk like donkeys, all of which lines up with some little details that donkeys let slip about their own pass through these movies, but I just wish there was something more like One Last Piece of Conclusive Evidence, something that relies a little less on tradition and a little more.

I don't know, a design-based scientific brain explosion. I got it, look at his species. The donkey appears to be exactly the same breed of donkey as the children turned into donkeys. enoki oh look at this in Pinocchio, it seems like the Pleasure Island boys turn into one of two types of donkeys, either completely brown or completely gray, no color on the tips of the ears, a lighter color along the stomach and a small tuft of black or brown hair on the head and down to the neck and now look at the donkey in Shrek, the same design, large tall ears with no color at the tips, a lighter gray color along his stomach and a small tuft of black hair on its head, neck, this looks really It is important to note that there are over one hundred and forty different breeds of donkeys and all of these breeds have very different hair lengths, very different hair colors and very different markings to the The fact that the donkey matches the exact guy we see leaving Pleasure Island feels like the smoking gun we were missing earlier, so at this point I have no choice but to stamp this theory as matpat certified new.

Really considering all this evidence, how is it possible that Donkey isn't a now-adult child from Pleasure Island? an answer to almost everything we know about the character we've established one that makes him one of the few famous fairy tale donkeys he was once human three he wore clothes like a donkey four he learned to control his brain but can still speak in English, Five was intimidated in the form of a donkey, Six comes from a tradition that also exists in Shrek and it turns out that Seven is the exact species of donkey that comes out of Pleasure Island;

There is simply no other fairy tale or nursery rhyme that covers the way the Pleasure Island theory doesn't even close, but if this is true, which it certainly appears to be, it opens up a very dark reality about the donkey, his personality and what he wants to keep hidden about his past shortly after Shrek, the third clip. I played before to get these lines where it seems like Donkey admits his tragic origin story when you're clearly unaware of the underpants, let's just say some things are better left unsaid and left at that, which at first appears to be a joke about donkeys who wear underwear according to this theory actually turn into donkeys and don't want to address the horrible way they turned into a donkey in the first place, some things are better left unsaid, you don't want to talk about your trauma, which is totally Fine until you consider the timeline. of events Pinocchio's story starts with him as a lifeless toy, let's call this stage one, then he becomes a living toy which we will call stage 2, stage 3 is when he partially turns into a living toy donkey for a while before finally entering stage 4 at the end of the film, when he becomes a fully developed human child.

Now, throughout the Shrek movies, Pinocchio appearsexclusively in his stage 2 living toy form, meaning that the events depicted in Shrek occur after Pinocchio comes to life, but before he is sent to Pleasure Island and converted. a strange partial donkey-shaped creature, so in the Shrek movies, Pinocchio has no idea that Pleasure Island exists, but the donkey does. In fact, we know that he managed to escape as we see in that clip of Alexandre. You could call yourself Alexander so you can "Don't all take it back, we know the donkey has turned, but he hasn't turned completely donkey yet like all the other kids who are being sent to the Salt Mines, which means he managed to escape before of that happening, in the long and short term of what I do.

What I'm saying here is that the donkey knows very well that Pleasure Island's evil plan to kidnap children and sell them as donkeys in the salt mines is in full swing, even when the events of Shrek are happening, the criminals who run the plan from Pleasure Island are very careful. Don't send any boys to the donkeys driven off the island until they can no longer talk, because the donkeys that can talk might tell the people on the mainland about their criminal enterprise and shut everything down, but here we have ourselves, the donkey , the only fairy tale creature that could end all the suffering of so many children, but the donkey accepts the challenge of being a hero, will he tell anyone about the current horrors of pleasure?

Island, are you doing anything to stop these atrocities? Let's just say some things are better left unsaid and left at that, he didn't say he just follows Shrek through some movies, he has fun punching dragons in the morning, I'm making waffles, he. he turned into a donkey because presumably he was a bad child it seems he hasn't improved with age the orphan children are being kidnapped and sold by the droves and the donkey is letting it happen does this make the donkey a complete idiot? Don't know. I know, but in the end there's definitely blood on the donkeys' hands or I guess on their hooves, but hey, that's just a theory.

Oh, movie theory and if you want to see more of Shrek, I suggest you watch our other video on Shrek's deadly farts. There is an actual scientific explanation for why his farts are so dangerous and we go into that in depth in the video on the left or, you know, do me a favor and check out that channel I mentioned earlier. Schaefer Ellis produces his analyzes of classic animated films from Disney and Pixar. He is incredibly insightful. in the observations of him and he's funny, he's not the best, but he's my favorite, which is a pretty impressive feat considering how generic the story is.

I first discovered him through his videos on Trek and I've been watching him ever since, but I don't think anyone will take one look at him and say, "Oh yeah, that's one of the best sequels in movie history." "Why am I Luigi?" valuable watch time that YouTube values ​​so much and tell Sencha and Shaffer List, if you ever want to do something together, let me know. I'd love to talk to you about what you're doing, man, and I hope this works. You need a little more attention so that's all for today. I need to start working on some scary theories by October.

I will see you then.