2018 / Video / Crowdsourced reanimated comedy collaboration

Shrek Retold

More than 200 creators remade Shrek one scene at a time, so every few seconds the movie found a new and stranger way to exist.

The original is off-site. HAHrchives preserves the story and a route back to it.

Watch on YouTube ↗

What happened

The familiar Shrek story remains mostly intact, but the visual language refuses to settle. Live action, rough animation, stop motion, puppetry, screenshots, musical interruptions, and deliberately ugly digital experiments hand the movie from one creator to the next.

Where it came from

3GI, the project led by Grant Duffrin, released Shrek Retold to YouTube on November 29, 2018. The feature-length fan collaboration assigns the 2001 film’s scenes to more than 200 contributors, each recreating their piece in a distinct style.

Why it mattered

Shrek Retold showed what a web-native remake could be when the point was not polish or ironic distance but collective comic escalation. It turned a durable internet fixation into a long-form artifact whose authorship is visibly shared.

How it spread

The 3GI upload gave the collaboration a single free, shareable home. Viewers circulated favorite scene changes, watched it communally, and treated the constant stylistic whiplash as the joke rather than a flaw to smooth over.