1996 short film by Jeffrey Katzenberg
Shrek - I Feel Good Animation Test is a 1996 American short film that was directed by Jeffrey Katzenberg and produced by J. J. Abrams, Rob Letterman, and Loren Soman. The animation test of Shrek is set to James Brown's 1965 single, "I Got You (I Feel Good)". Shrek's voice was provided by Chris Farley and the mugger was voiced by Tom Kenny.
A 5-second snippet of the short was uploaded to YouTube on October 6, 2010 as part of Loreno Soman's demo reel. 13 years later on September 15, 2023, a YouTube user named TheNormalGuy213 found more stills from the film. On November 23, 2023, Barry E. Jackson released the short film on his YouTube channel, The Zoom Art Studio, following an interview with some of the animators of the animation test.
The film was a popular source of discussion in the animation community, and the lost media community, due to not being publicly available at the time. Originally, the remaining 29 seconds of the film was held by an unknown eBay buyer who bought the film and several sculptures of the old Shrek model on a now closed eBay auction, that was opened by a Dreamworks employee named Tim Lawrence II.
Plot.
Shrek is dancing in a medieval village at nighttime to the James Brown song I Got You (I Feel Good). A masked bandit jumps down from a building hanging on a rope to mug Shrek. The bandit threatens Shrek with a knife, but Shrek laughs at him, pulls on the bandit's rope, and sends the bandit flying into the sky. Shrek looks up, and resumes dancing.
Reception and legacy.
When it was presented to Jeffrey Katzenberg and other officials in May 1997, Katzenberg disliked it to the point that he discarded the tape that the animation team held during that meeting, (they had another tape which was sold in the eBay auction in 2018) and the animation team who worked on the film, nicknamed the Propellerheads, were consequently fired after the presentation.
The film was completely unknown up until 2018, when the eBay auction caught attention since people didn't have much information on the pre-development of Shrek, and it eventually was bought by an unknown eBay buyer for $3,000.