Parenting & Family Quote by Antonio Banderas

Banderas is letting the mask slip on one of animation's most profitable tricks: the kids buy the ticket, but the adults are the real long-term audience. When he says Shrek "makes an effect in older people", he's pointing to a deliberate double-coding. The film isn't accidentally smart; it's engineered to land on two frequencies at once. Children get the slapstick, the talking animals, the fairy-tale quest. Older viewers get the winks: the pop-culture riffs, the genre parody, the sly innuendo, the satire of Disney-style purity. That split is the point, and Banderas, as Puss in Boots, is practically the embodiment of it - a character that plays as cute sidekick for kids and as suave, self-aware pastiche for everyone else.

There's also an actor's diplomacy in his phrasing. He doesn't say "adult jokes" or "dirty humor"; he says "not for kids" and "would not understand", which reframes the same material as sophistication rather than impropriety. It's a way of defending the franchise's edge without sounding like he's marketing naughtiness to children.

Context matters: Shrek arrived when family entertainment was shifting from earnest, sanitized storytelling to postmodern, reference-heavy comedy that assumed parents were exhausted, media-literate, and hungry for something that didn't talk down to them. Banderas' comment recognizes how the movie smuggles adult pleasure into a children's package - and why it became a cultural event instead of just another cartoon.