Children’s-Film Sequels as Imagined by Famous Directors

Shrek 4
by Woody Allen

Shrek (no longer Mike Myers. Me? Failing me, Ewan McGregor?) is a disenchanted oboist living in a land called Far, Far Away (for our purposes, Far, Far Away is Scarsdale). His wife, Fiona (Téa Leoni speaking like she’s not a goy), can no longer satisfy him in bed. The two struggle impotently under the covers. Shrek puts on his glasses and makes a wisecrack about how sex is almost as fun as reading Dreiser. They order Chinese and Shrek reads the Science Times in his underwear, obsessing over an article about the expanding universe. A Benny Goodman song plays, and Fiona remarks absently that Shrek’s record collection was “mysteriously burned” in an apartment fire. Shrek suffers unspeakably beneath a mask of ironic good humor. While eating at a Greek diner on Broadway and worrying about his blood pressure, Shrek meets Princess Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a creature who is green like him but not Jewish or married. Her naiveté is charming—especially that way she has of being 25 years younger than him—and she seems receptive to his fumbling, pretentious overtures. She inexplicably agrees to sleep with him, and he tries to get her to worry about the expanding universe. When she appears blithely unaware of the Dostoyevskian pall of death hanging over New York City, he compliments her on her legs. Donkey (should be Alan Alda—recast Eddie Murphy as Princess Charlotte’s father) advises Shrek not to continue with the affair, but Shrek makes a series of frantic hand gestures to signify that he’s not in the advice-taking business. In the end, Princess Charlotte gets married to some pischer who’s actually her age, and Shrek realizes that if he imitates Humphrey Bogart, Fiona’s futile struggling transforms into attentive lovemaking.

Untitled
Second Installment
of Kung Fu Panda
by David Lynch

The Kung Fu Panda (Justin Theroux) has been away from suburban Moosetown for three years to practice his martial arts. When he returns home, he discovers that Girl Panda (Laura Dern) has gone missing. While swimming naked in a nearby lake, the Kung Fu Panda makes temporary eye contact with a mossy female corpse whose face is frozen in a permanent half-scream. Unsettled, the Kung Fu Panda decides to play bocce with his neighbors, a retired marsupial couple whose mannerisms and dress are stuck in the year 1954. They cannot get the mallets out of the garage, however, because a severed human hand is putrefying in the backseat of the couple’s ‘54 Buick Skylark, and the couple (Dennis Hopper and the female equivalent of Dennis Hopper, if one exists) don’t want the Kung Fu Panda to find out. Suddenly the sky goes very dark, the Kung Fu Panda feels his pulse quicken, and “Embraceable You” plays in the background. The Kung Fu Panda dreams that he makes love to Girl Panda. She asks him to hit her and he does, raising his paw against the numbing ignorance of values-centric Middle America. She laughs and her lips bleed. There is a bolt of lightning outside, and the Kung Fu Panda wakes up to see the male half of the marsupial couple dancing in his bedroom with Girl Panda. The marsupial male is crying and wearing a neon-green dress. Girl Panda hugs him tightly. They are both splattered with blood. The Kung Fu Panda considers leaving Moosetown and then doesn’t.

Happy Feet 2:
A Penguin in New York City
by Sidney Lumet

A dancing penguin (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman) finds himself displaced in New York City after a mix-up with his handler, a crooked cop who’s looking the other way while the mafia floods the East Coast with valuable Arctic eye candy. The penguin meets a seal named Damien (voiced by Al Pacino), who grudgingly shows him the ropes. The two end up living together in Damien’s uptown apartment. The penguin is introduced to some beautiful fish that look Asian (all voiced by Lucy Liu) and falls in love with one of them. They make love for the first time, savagely, and the penguin wields his once weak cock like a sword. The fish completely submits to him. In the next room, Damien is smoking an Italian cigar and listening knowingly to the penguin’s boyish grunts. The penguin realizes that the fish is an expensive mistress. He needs money fast. He consults a neurotic walrus (voiced by Colin Farrell) with connections to some of New York’s most powerful drug lords. The penguin becomes a mule, but quits after he is forced to watch a sand crab (voiced by Denzel Washington) get shot over a kilo of crack. In the final segment of the film, Damien and the penguin decide to rob a bank. The robbery, which was supposed to take 10 minutes, ends up lasting more than 12 hours and attracting a media circus. Damien entertains everyone by pretending to be Jewish. In the end, both are arrested and forced to contemplate their manhood while a spunky tortoise (voiced by Will Smith) comes on to them in Attica.