Dude Shrek was a piece of shit and should be called a piece of shit. It was a piece of shit then, it's a piece of shit now, and if "people like it" is reason enough for canonization let's talk about the SNL "Here Comes Pat" sketches or Crocodile Dundee embarrassing a transgender woman to the uproarious laughter of the entire bar. Or fuckin' 20 years of Apu on The Simpsons. People Of A Certain Age find garbage like "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" to be uproariously funny because it's chockablock with right-this-minute cultural references and it-people that preserve pre-Kennedy Assassination America in amber for the ElderBoomers to point at and scream "kidsthesedaysdon'tknowcomedy" as their teeth fall into their Geritol And It's Fucking Bullshit. So's Shrek. So's ALL Dreamworks animation. It marks the point where American entertainment switched from an attempt at universalism and broad appeal across all markets to a craven instant-by-instant pandering to the trends of the moment. It's why the only thing we make now is superhero movies and nostalgia pieces; no other country is going to spend the money on superheroes and nostalgia is the only way you can reliably bank on Americans. Every fucking movie is now a christmas movie.
To be honest, I haven't seen Shrek since it was in the theaters, and I was ... what...? 22 years old? I don't think I saw the second one, either. But it was funny at the time. Not sure I'd spend the time to watch it again, tho. Lots more on my list than Shrek. My real issue was the 'journalist' making the quality of the animation a leading point of his contention it is a crap film... and then never addressing a single thing about the animation style except one sidelong hinted reference to the "uncanny valley". It may be a terrible film, but the article is worse in every journalistic regard.
Shrek and Amelie were in the "New Releases" section of Blockbuster at the same time. This came up a lot with girls I was dating. Reaching for Shrek on a pre-Netflix "Netflix and chill" date night was a sign that things weren't going to last. The lede is "toilet humor, glibness and shoddy animation." And I mean Shrek, April 2001: Spirited Away, August 2002: Disney dumped Spirited Away in SIX THEATERS because they were contractually obligated to release it. It lasted eight weeks then vanished, then won an Oscar and literally embarrassed Disney into giving it a wide release. That approach to non-referential, non-pop-culture burial is ENTIRELY due to the popularity of Shrek. At the time of Disney's burial of Spirited Away, it was the most popular movie in the history of Japan.
Well.... I mean the Muppet show is arguably artistically more high brow than Shrek, but if someone tried to put on Kermit and Ms. Piggy during a Netflix and Chill session it would also indicate to me that things ain't gonna last... right? My point being that "not going to go well" is exactly the correct assessment to make for lots of movie selections from Shrek to Transformers if you are hoping to impress someone. A lot of the popular movies now are shit nostalgia fests and all, but Shrek is intended for immature audiences, right? Most mature adults who saw it would have done so with their kids and laughed along at the fart jokes, the whole point is that it entertains the young'uns and is not too god-awful for the rest of us to endure. For what its worth I tried to introduce my kids to Spirited Away, Nausicaa and a some other films like that about a year ago and they were bored, as the concept of a ghost representing time or whatever was not interesting enough to hold their gaze for long. They are also bored by the Marvel movies once the whizz-bang scenes are over...
Shrek is what the industry calls a "four quadrant" feature: kids, men 16-25, women 16-25, adults over 25. Shrek was, in fact, the quintessential example of a "four quadrant" feature until at least 2007, despite the fact that high-dollar animation is invariably "four quadrant." How many themes in Toy Story are entirely over the head of the average eight year old? Is ET a kid's movie? The difference is that Shrek was designed for now and used the lowest comedy imaginable. It started the trend of reaction, rather than action. It taught an entire generation of executives that there is more money in being irreverent rather than relevant, so now we have no movies that are about anything. It's all about reacting to other things.