The Shrek franchise has one of the cleanest emotional engines in animated film. Shrek is the grouch with a soft middle. Fiona is the princess who’d rather be the swamp wife. Donkey is the chaos motor. Puss in Boots is the dramatic counterweight. Throw the four of them in a room and you have a movie. Throw three more in, and the math gets weird.
That’s the basic problem with Shrek the Third (2007) and Shrek Forever After (2010). Shrek and Fiona’s triplets aren’t bad. They’re just not characters. And once a franchise built around character chemistry adds three new main residents who can’t carry a scene, the chemistry has to compensate for them, not include them.
A quick refresher. At the end of Shrek the Third, after a movie spent watching Shrek panic about the very concept of fatherhood, Fiona gives birth to triplets named Fergus, Farkle, and Felicia. We meet them as squalling newborns in the closing credits. By Shrek Forever After, they’re toddlers, and the film’s inciting incident is essentially a parental burnout episode. Shrek, drowning in the relentless work of having three small kids, signs a deal with Rumpelstiltskin to get a single day of his old ogre life back. The babies are the catalyst that pushes him into the deal and the love that pulls him out of it. They’re functioning emotionally. They’re not functioning narratively.
Watch how the films actually deploy them. In Shrek the Third, the triplets exist mostly as a dream sequence. Shrek’s nightmare of being a bad dad sees a baby Fergus appearing in his bed, his lamp, his sofa, his cooking pot, like a haunting. It’s a great gag. It’s also the closest the film gets to letting the kids occupy emotional space, and it’s a fantasy. The actual babies aren’t there yet. Forever After does slightly better. Felicia is shown to be the first triplet to speak (her line, “Wake up daddy,” is the closest any of the three gets to a personality beat). She’s seen carrying a doll named Sir Squeakles. She’s specifically the one Shrek gravitates toward in the alternate-timeline ending. Fergus and Farkle are mostly interchangeable.
Compare that to how the franchise introduced its other supporting players. Donkey gets a meet-cute in the first movie that establishes his entire personality in three minutes. Puss in Boots gets an Antonio Banderas swordfight that conveys backstory and dimension in seconds. Even the residents of secondary status, Gingy, Pinocchio, the Three Little Pigs, have visual and verbal tics that read as character. The triplets get crying, walking, and maybe one good line apiece. The audience never gets the entry point that would make us miss them when they’re off-screen.
This isn’t a complaint about babies on principle. The Incredibles franchise made Jack-Jack an amazing character in modern animation. Storks built a whole movie around the comedy of infant management. Boss Baby, for better or worse, gave you a baby with an interior life. Shrek never did that for any of the three. Partly that’s a Shrek problem (the franchise’s house style is sass and pop-culture needle drops, not parenting verite). Partly it’s a chronology problem. The triplets were introduced too late and then put on screen too briefly to develop them into people.
The franchise knows this. You can see it in the casting strategy for Shrek 5. Zendaya was cast as a teenage Felicia in February 2025, and the marketing has leaned into her almost exclusively. Marcello Hernández and Skyler Gisondo were later announced as teen Fergus and Farkle at the 2025 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but they’re clearly the supporting voice cast. Felicia is the entry point. She’s the kid we already knew a little about, the one with a doll and a first word and a parental moment. The new film is being built around her in the way Pixar built Toy Story 4 around Bo Peep’s emotional arc by way of Woody. Felicia is the inheritor.
Which is the right call, if a slightly late one. Shrek 5 is now scheduled for June 30, 2027, after slipping from December 2026 (which was itself a slip from July 2026), making it the first Shrek feature in 17 years. They’re not bringing back a baby. They’re bringing back the most defined of the three babies, aged into someone with attitude and reactions and a relationship to her parents that can carry a movie. That move acknowledges what Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After couldn’t quite figure out. In a franchise that runs on banter, the new characters need to be old enough to banter back.
There’s something almost wistful about the triplets as they were. They are the franchise’s first attempt at expanding the family beyond Shrek, Fiona, and Donkey, and the attempt was, frankly, not great. The films loved them. The audience never quite got to. Shrek 5 is the do-over. Zendaya is the casting move that says: this time, we’re giving you a kid you can hang a sequel on.
