Shrek 2 is an American animated fantasy film produced by DreamWorks animation. The film received over an incredible $900 million in box office and is Dreamwork's most successful film to date. The film is Oscar nominated and has won many awards such as BAFA awards in 2005 and 5 awards in the People's Choice awards such as ''Favourite Animated Movie Star' for donkey.
F A N D O M - H E N R Y J E N K I N S
Henry Jenkins's Fandom Theory suggests that fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings. Fans appropriate texts and read them in a direction that might of not been originally authorised by producers, this is known as 'poaching'. Consumers create their own identity by borrowing inflecting mass culture images.
One popular way of 'poaching' among the Shrek fandom is fan fictions. The movie's plot, characters, storyline, songs, and setting is used by fans to create stories, most of them are mixed with other plots and characters from different movies, like the example shown.
Textual poaching is a term popularized by Henry Jenkins and is used to explore the way in which dedicated fans respond to popular media products. One of the most important ways is creating communities, where fans of the specific media product can communicate with each other, share ideas and creativity and even make friends who share the same interest, this is known as 'audience convergence'. Although these are usually done online on websites such as Reddit, an example of this being linked to Shrek is an annual fan meetup known as 'Shrek Fest', where fans meet up and share art, costumes, 'roars' and music relating to Shrek.
This art created by a fan is an example of an audience creator convergence. In this case, the audience member has created a piece of fan art by drawing an official character in Shrek 2. This allows the fans to demonstrate their ideas and artistic skills.
Fans sometimes create their own outfits to fit in with their created identity. Fans participate with the chosen media product with their organisation and efforts, which can bring awareness to the media product.
Wow. I never knew about Shrek Fest - I'm not quite sure I wanted to know about Shrek Fest.
I love Henry Jenkins ideas - it's such an interesting and important part of how we look at the media - but it makes the subject such a messy thing to study - where do texts begin and end? It arguably throws a lot of Stuart Halls Reception Theory under the bus - or does it just enhance and adapt his ideas?
In fact, Hall's Encoding/Decoding model may have been a good comparison to make when critiquing Jenkins - as well as looking at the importance of Baudrillard's take on Postmodernism to consider how the media is manufactured to encourage this…