William Steig: Shrek & Co.
“For some reason, I’ve never felt grown up.”
When asked his opinion about the movie based on his picture book Shrek, William Steig responded: “It’s vulgar, it’s disgusting — and I loved it.” Featuring Mike Meyer as the voice of the long suffering ogre, Eddie Murphy as the wisecracking Donkey, and Cameron Diaz as the feisty Princess Fiona, the movie may be the best children’s film ever (an opinion I share with my niece and nephews). Two sequels have followed as well as a Broadway musical. And even though the book seems sketchy compared to the film, what the film gets right is the spirit of William Steig: his clever and hilarious ways of playing with other children’s stories, a wittiness which makes Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” seem like a walk in the park.
The conventional story about William Steig is that he was a grown-up and for thirty years a famed cartoonist for adult readers of the New Yorker. Then, at the age of 60, he suddenly decided to become a writer for children. That was the view on offer at a recent exhibit of his work in the Spring of 2008 when the Jewish Museum in New York mounted a retrospective (“From the New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig”)…
