Meet the third year who’s written her entire dissertation on Shrek

‘It’s such a meme at this point, but honestly I’ve found a new respect for the film’


It’s widely accepted that Shrek is the absolute best film ever made. And now one final year uni student has taken this one step further, and written her entire dissertation on it.

In the most iconic move of the 21st century, UEA student Georgina has written an entire 12,000 words on Shrek as part of her Film and Television degree.

Her diss title even includes the banger of a quote “Do you think maybe he’s compensating for something?”, and looks at how Shrek inverts Disney’s classic fairytale films.

Speaking to The Tab, Georgina says her idea for Shrek came from a tipsy chat she had with a friend in second year. She says: “We were talking about Shrek as a meme and I said something like ‘it’s actually quite groundbreaking'”, before she and her mate talked about it some more and realised it could be her dissertation idea.

She says she went to a lecturer for “validation”, and was told her idea had lots of potential and given some books to start her initial research.

She says people were often confused when she told them she was writing about Shrek – “occasionally followed by a bit of a scoff”. But then people were interested in the topic (how could they not be?), and she’s had loads of requests to read it, too.

She says: “It’s such a meme at this point, but honestly I’ve found a new respect for the film.”

Georgina had to watch Shrek in its entirety about five times to be able to write her diss – but some of the scenes she has to watch upwards of 30 times so she could properly analyse them: “I’ll probably give it a while until I rewatch it.”

She says what she found was “way deeper” than she’d been expecting.

“Shrek was legit meant to be a massive ‘fuck you’ to Disney”, Georgina says. “The film seems to want to be a better and more funny version of a Disney fairytale film, so they developed technically advanced CGI, improved representation of women and tried to villainise what Disney stood for.”

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