Feature film experience marks Shrek's first foray to TV. Shrek the Halls includes the expertise of veteran Lou Dellarosa, who worked on the Shrek film franchise. All images ™ & © 2007 DreamWorks Animation L.L.C. All Rig

After three blockbuster Shrek movies, the Oscar-winning ogre from PDI/DreamWorks arrives on TV screens in 2007 in the new ABC-TV Christmas special Shrek the Halls. Like its feature film predecessors, this half-hour show stars the voices of Mike Myers as Shrek, Eddie Murphy as Donkey, Cameron Diaz as Fiona and Antonio Banderas as Puss 'N Boots. Directed by Gary Trousdale, (Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) Shrek the Halls, visits Shrek and Fiona and their brood in the swamp, to watch their Family Christmas unfold.

Considerable feature film experience was brought to bear on Shrek's first foray to the home screen, including the expertise of veteran animator Lou Dellarosa, who with Anthony Hodgson supervised the animators on this show. Dellarosa has worked on the Shrek film franchise, as well as the PDI/DreamWorks features Over The Hedge and Madagascar. He'd previously collaborated with Trousdale on The Madagascar Penguins in A Christmas Caper, and he offers an informed perspective on where Shrek the Halls fits in the canon.

For Dellarosa, the challenge in bringing Shrek to TV was having to keep the characters contained within a certain aspect ratio. Sometimes that meant physically placing characters in different spaces and tailoring the animation.

"The biggest challenge in terms of bringing Shrek to the television format is that we had to keep our characters contained within a certain aspect ratio," says Dellarosa. "Sometimes that means physically placing characters in different spaces, and you have to tailor the animation for how broad you can go with the character moving across the screen. You have to be aware of where they are in screen space. That was a challenge, because we're used to seeing the characters in a wider aspect ratio and it's hard to keep that in mind when you're animating for television."

Yet Dellarosa doesn't believe that this limited Shrek the Halls to being a "TV closeup" project. "I think we could pretty much cover on television whatever we covered in widescreen. We didn't want to limit ourselves." While Dellarosa's animation crew of 20 -- which was broken up into four teams of five animators each -- worked three months to create the show's 22 minutes of character animation, he says they treated the project as if it were a feature film. "We saw our dailies on the big screen, so we knew it would hold up. We weren't looking at small monitors."

Shrek the Halls includes characters that Dellarosa calls "the usual suspects," including the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs, as well as the offspring of Donkey and Dragon. The princesses of Shrek the Third, which Dellarosa had been responsible for, don't make an appearance in Shrek the Halls, but the show does contain human characters in the form of townspeople. "We've cut back on the amount of character density in this. There are still some, and they kept us pretty busy, but it's not to the degree that there was in Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third. This story is a little more homespun, and that gave us more chances to spend time with the characters that we know."