Uh oh! That other jolly green giant could be in trouble.
Shrek 2 is the latest animated film title to be "outed" by Christian fundamentalists in the United States. On its website, the Traditional Values Coalition is warning parents about the cross-dressing and transgender themes contained in the hit DreamWorks feature.
" Shrek 2 is billed as harmless entertainment but contains subtle sexual messages," says the coalition, which describes itself as a grassroots interdenominational lobby with more than 43,000 member churches. "Parents who are thinking about taking their children to see Shrek 2 may wish to consider the following."
The article then proceeds to describe one of the characters, an "evil" bartender (voiced by Larry King) who is a male-to-female transgender in transition and who expresses a sexual desire for Prince Charming.
In another identified scene, Shrek and Donkey need rescuing from a dungeon by Pinocchio and his nose, which is made to extend as an escape bridge by getting the wooden boy to lie about not wearing women's underwear.
The TVC report, A Gender Identity Disorder Goes Mainstream, raps DreamWorks for helping to promote cross-dressing and transgenderism.
But Charles Keil, a film-studies professor at the University of Toronto, says transgendered groups might also have reason to complain about being parodied. "You have an image within a comic context that could be read either way," says Keil, who adds quickly that such humour is designed for parents anyway and goes way above the heads of the children in the audience.
"If the kids don't get it, it doesn't really matter."
Keil says the whole idea behind the Shrek movies is a general message of tolerance -- that outward appearances don't matter and that it's what's underneath that counts -- and such complaints defeat that larger, more important message.
"Targeting minuscule elements within a much larger work and then trying to extract from that some kind of argument that borders on the paranoid is really misconstruing the general aim of this entertainment."
So far, the Coalition's gaydar doesn't seem to have picked up on DreamWorks's Shark Tale, in which a shark mafioso, voiced by Robert DeNiro, must come to terms with the fact he has a vegetarian son who likes to dress up as a dolphin.
But the Shrek accusation follows hot on the heels of other cases of animated characters being accused of infiltrating the minds of America's children with pro-gay messages, much to the detriment of traditional family values.
Recently, PBS was upbraided by the group Focus on the Family -- and supported by the U.S. secretary of education, no less -- for an episode of the cartoon series Postcards from Buster, in which Buster the rabbit encounters a couple of kids with lesbian parents.
Christian activists have also targeted SpongeBob SquarePants, Barney and Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie as children's characters who are conduits for a soft-on-gays message.