Shrek is a "search" story because it involves a quest for treasure -- externally, Shrek is after the Princess and is seeking the reward of being left at peace in his swamp, and on a more profound level the film shows both he and Fiona on to be quests to discover themselves and their capacity for love and self-acceptance that they didn't really now they were on. Both internal and external searches find strong origins in myth (Seger, 1). It is also a hero story about overcoming prejudice against the fairy tale creatures (one of the best scenes is the brutal interrogation of a gingerbread man who is a member of the resistance), with Shrek as the primary hero. The film is nontraditional in that the hero never starts out as mundane, but ultimately gains a "normal" existence (Seger, 2).

Despite the high level of mythical identification that is possible...
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