Chris Miller
Chris Miller is an actor, born 1968.
Chris Miller, born in Washington, D.C. in 1968, is an animator, director and voice actor, and he is not the Chris Miller of the other well-known directing partnership, a confusion that follows him around. He spent most of his career at DreamWorks Animation and now works at Paramount Animation.
His voice work is the part audiences have heard most without knowing it. He plays the Magic Mirror across the Shrek films, performed as a smarmy game-show host, which is the joke that sets the whole series' tone: the fairy-tale world runs on television formats. He also voices Kowalski across the Madagascar films and Penguins of Madagascar, the penguin who does the calculations and gets them confidently wrong.
As a director he made Shrek the Third in 2007 and Puss in Boots in 2011, and the gap between those two is instructive. Shrek the Third is the point where the series ran out of fairy-tale jokes and started recycling them; Puss in Boots is far better than a spin-off about a supporting character had any right to be, a Spanish-inflected adventure with real visual style and a proper romantic double act. At Paramount he led, directed and starred in Smurfs in 2025, voicing Grouchy Smurf and Camouflage.
Movies (26)
- Shrek (2001)
- Shrek 2 (2004)
- Madagascar (2005)
- Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
- Penguins of Madagascar (2014)
- Shrek Forever After (2010)
- Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (2012)
- Monsters vs Aliens (2009)
- Shrek the Third (2007)
- Shrek the Third (2007)
- Smurfs (2025)
- Smurfs (2025)
- Puss in Boots (2011)
- Puss in Boots (2011)
- Turbo (2013)
- Shrek 5 (2027)
- Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)
- Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017)
- Puss in Boots: The Three Diablos (2012)
- The Boss Baby (2017)
- The Madagascar Penguins in a Christmas Caper (2005)
- Merry Madagascar (2009)
- Madly Madagascar (2013)
- Far Far Away Idol (2004)
- Shrek in the Swamp Karaoke Dance Party (2001)
- The Penguins of Madagascar - Operation: Penguin Takeover (2014)
TV (1)
Where to start with Chris Miller
Puss in Boots is the one to start with and the best thing he has directed: a spin-off that ignores its own franchise obligations and makes a swashbuckler instead, with a genuine chemistry problem to solve between the cat and Kitty Softpaws.
For the voice work, go to Shrek and listen for the Magic Mirror in the opening act, then Shrek 2, where the character gets the best of the series' media satire. Madagascar introduces Kowalski, and Penguins of Madagascar promotes him and three colleagues to leads.
Shrek the Third is his other feature and the weakest of the four Shrek films, worth watching mainly to see where a comic formula stops working. Smurfs is the recent one, made for children and no one else.
The Shrek films
He voices the Magic Mirror across the series and directed the third one. The Mirror is a small running joke that survives four films, which is a reasonable definition of a good animation bit part.
Madagascar and Kowalski
Kowalski is the tall thinking penguin, and the running gag is that his plans are always both elaborate and useless. The penguins outgrew the films and got a series and a feature of their own.
The directing credits
Puss in Boots is the best of them, a spaghetti-western fairy tale with far more visual invention than a Shrek spin-off required. Smurfs in 2025 is the most recent.