Shrek vs. Shrek 5: A comparison of character designs. Fans not happy with new versions of beloved characters

The new announcement of Shrek 5, to be released in 2026, has stirred up a lot of emotions among fans of the green ogre and his friends. These emotions, for the most part, are negative, as many DreamWorks Animation fans can't get over the change in design of the series' characters that the studio decided on years later.

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So let's take a look at how Shrek's characters look in the fifth installment of the series compared to the first. In the tease, Shrek, Donkey, Fiona, Pinocchio and Shrek and Fiona's daughter were shown, however, since she is a new character and whose look must have been drastically changed due to the fact that she was last seen as an infant, she can be excluded from the comparison. So let's focus on the other four: Shrek, Donkey, Fiona and Pinocchio.

Source: ownScreenshots: Shrek 5, Walt Dohrn and Conrad Vernon, DreamWorks Animation, 2026 / Shrek, Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, DreamWorks Animation, 2001

The characters are indeed different in Shrek 5 from what they looked like in the first installment or even the three that followed, where studio still relied on designs very similar to the initial ones. Now, however, there are drastic changes that have made Shrek's face slimmer and more expressive, Donkey is more “hairy,” Fiona is mostly the same, and Pinocchio looks both more innocent and older, which for a puppet can be surprising. Anyway, it can be said of all the characters that they look older, but this is the natural order of things that we have to accept – the heroes of our childhood, like us, grow older. And the passage of time can be seen most clearly from the child of Shrek and Fiona, who went from being an infant to a teenager/young adult. And it's probably for this purpose that the daughter was placed in this preview.

The changes are certainly due to advances in technology, the studio has much more capabilities than it did more than 20 years ago, allowing the designs to be more refined (more detail on Donkey's coat). The studio's style has also changed, as was already evident in the latest Puss in Boots movie, where the Cat also looks a bit different from the Shrek movies.

Shrek fans on the web are expressing dissatisfaction with these changes, as can be seen, for example, under the announcement post on X, even comparing this situation to Sonic the Hedgehog, where the first character design in the new film series was also met with criticism – which in turn led to changes that make Sonic resemble himself from the games.

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