Review: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)

 Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)

Rated PG for action/violence, rude humor/language, and some scary moments

Score: 5 out of 5

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a movie I missed last year, which made it kind of annoying to hear so many people praising it to the heavens as one of the best animated films in years, not least of all because I'm the kind of guy who does not like spoilers. Flying down to Florida just in time to share a house with three little kids over Christmas break gave me the perfect opportunity to check it out, and the only thing I'm disappointed about is not seeing it sooner. It doesn't reinvent the wheel or have any pretensions of being a particularly revelatory movie, but it's still an outstandingly well-put-together one in everything from the animation to the characters to the humor to the mayhem. Putting it side-by-side with Shrek, the film that put DreamWorks Animation in the spotlight and which this one is a sequel to a spinoff of, shows just how much the studio has evolved in the twenty-plus years since then, going from mischievous, Looney Tunes-esque pop culture spoofs with barbs aimed directly at Disney to a kind of family-friendly, character-driven adventure comedy that's clearly inspired by the Mouse but still has enough unique style and dramatic edge to stand out. I don't really have much to add to the conversation on this one except to say that it's easily one of the best films that DreamWorks has ever made, especially given what I thought of the movie they released just eight months before this, and one that I expect to stick around as a classic just like Shrek itself.

Set in a fantasy/fairy-tale version of Spain, our eponymous protagonist is an intelligent cat who has exploited his nine lives to become an adventurer who doesn't fear death... at least, not until he loses his eighth life thanks to his carelessness fighting a monster attacking a town. Suddenly, he no longer feels so invincible, especially once he encounters a mysterious wolf bounty hunter who seeks to claim his ninth and final life after watching him squander his previous eight. Going into retirement in an elderly cat lady's home after burying his sword and gear, Puss is dragged back to the world of adventure when Goldilocks, the thuggish leader of the Three Bears Crime Family (guess who her "enforcers" are), seeks to hire him to find the Wishing Star, a magical rock that would grant one wish to whoever discovers it -- and she won't take no for an answer. Puss decides that this star is his key to regaining his nine lives, and with help from an old flame named Kitty Softpaws, he sets out to find it himself, staying one step ahead of Goldilocks, the evil businessman "Big" Jack Horner who wants it for his own ends, and of course, the Wolf.

The look of the film is one of the most immediately striking things about it. While it's not the first film to use cel shading to make computer animation emulate the look of hand-drawn animation while being distinct from both (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Mitchells vs. the Machines did something similar recently), it's going for a different set of influences than those films, its look instead resembling a mix of the fairy tale artwork that the Shrek movies have always spoofed and anime in the action scenes. The settings feel lifted almost from a highly stylized painting or storybook, while the action looks downright sublime, the film's characters doing battle, chasing one another, and facing various treacherous foes on their quest for the Wishing Star in all manner of awesome ways. Even as cats, Puss and Kitty came across as credible and cool adventure heroes, especially with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek Pinault leaning heavily into their live-action screen personas, Banderas playing Puss as a riff on Zorro where the only real "parody" element comes from his species and Hayek playing Kitty as the cool femme fatale who has history with the hero that they'll inevitably have to settle. Florence Pugh was hilarious doing her best gender-flipped Ray Winstone impression as Goldilocks, especially with the real Winstone himself voicing one of the three bears (alongside Olivia Colman and Samson Kayo), while John Mulaney made Horner into an absolute bastard who I couldn't wait to see get his well-deserved comeuppance. At first glance, with three separate groups of characters all racing for the Wishing Star, this film can feel sprawling, and yet it always manages to tie these three stories together in a way that feels organic.

The key to doing this was the Wolf. From the moment we're introduced to him, he's presented as a metaphorical representation of death itself, an impossibly skilled fighter who trounces and nearly kills Puss in their first encounter and who is seemingly unstoppable from that point onward, every meeting he has with Puss feeling like it could be their last. The film's comedy stops dead cold whenever the whistling announcing his arrival starts up, Wagner Moura's performance lending him an almost demonic menace without going over-the-top into cackling supervillainy. He is one of the best villains I've seen in any animated film in a long while, a no-nonsense monster whose evil combines the most terrifying elements of an unstoppable force of nature and somebody who hates you personally, the closest thing that a family film could come to an outright slasher movie villain. There have been many jokes made about this film having one of the most realistic depictions of a panic attack in any animated film, but watching it, it was no joke: I understood immediately how this guy completely disarmed Puss' suave, arrogant demeanor and left him a trembling wreck running for his life. The Wolf wasn't just scary, he was a perfect villain for Puss, a representation of how his wasted life is finally catching up with him, and watching Puss reach a place where he can finally confront the Wolf and turn the tables on him was immeasurably satisfying.

From this, we get a fairly simple moral that largely boils down to a celebration of living life to the fullest rather than either wasting it on hedonism or remaining stuck in an idealized past. It's nothing revolutionary, but not only is it exactly the kind of thing that the fairy tales this movie is sending up have long embraced, it's well-told enough that I fully bought into it. If the original Shrek was a deconstructive parody of fairy tales that sent up their moral messages while offering a few of its own, then this film serves largely as a more faithful, straightforward throwback to them, amped up with a swashbuckling action/adventure plot and some jokes for the parents but otherwise falling squarely within the modern, post-Kung Fu Panda DreamWorks wheelhouse.

The Bottom Line

It's a very straightforward movie once you get past the stylish animation, but hardly to a fault, as it's still a riotous, heartfelt, and just plain awesome ride that delivers exactly where it counts and doesn't overstay its welcome. Easily one of the best family films of the last ten years.