Here, kitty
DreamWorks Animation, once the unlovely home of such crimes against animation as Shark Tale and Bee Movie, has been quietly handing Disney and Pixar their asses on a platter for so long now that it should no longer come as a surprise when it happens, but it still feels like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish can't possibly be as good as it is. With this film, DreamWorks comes full circle: once upon a time, in 2001, the studio released Shrek, which I believe had perhaps the most disproportionately negative impact on the rest of cinema of any single film released in the current century, doing more than any other individual title to ruin the entire medium of computer animation for a decade or more; now, a direct descendant of Shrek has swaggered out into the world with the boldest, coolest, most radical use of that same medium of any major-studio feature outside of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. And know that I was extremely tempted to just flat-out start this review with the sentence "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is DreamWorks Animation's version of Spider-Verse" and the reason I didn't is because I think that sets an extremely unfair standard for The Last Wish that it's not attempting to meet and shouldn't be held to. But let's put it this way: I can't think of anything made by any of DreamWorks, Disney, Pixar, Illumination, or even Sony Pixar Imageworks itself to have come closer to meeting that ridiculously lofty claim.
To be clear, I'm speaking entirely about the film's animation. Script-wise, this is, if anything, DreamWorks Animation's version of Tangled: as we are told in voiceover right at the start, delivered by none other than the swashbuckling cat adventurer Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) himself, there's a magical whatsit that everybody is chasing after, and in the course of finding it, the rakish lothario Puss will find himself confronted with the possibility that his roguelike ways aren't making him as happy as settling down with a gorgeous woman who's too good for him would be. The latter part isn't in the voice-over, I should say, it's just the plot. Most of all, this is DreamWorks Animation's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, almost explicitly so (and, indeed, it is explicit if you count the fact that the filmmakers have claimed that inspiration in interviews), with a single, extremely important lift from For a Few Dollars More in the form of a haunting musical refrain that recurs as a precursor the villain's appearances.
The good in this case consists Puss himself, as well as his former lover, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), and a stupid, purehearted little nameless dog (Harvey Guillén) who aggressively befriends Puss while the cat is briefly trying out retirement in the home of a dotty old cat lady named Mama Luna (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). The ugly are Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears - Papa (Ray Winstone), Mama (Olivia Colman), and Baby (Samson Kayo) - here reimagined as a Guy Ritchie-esque Cockney crime family, and to be fair, most of that reimagining was done simply by fact of casting Winstone. The bad is Big Jack Horner (John Mulaney), who has been nursing a grudge his whole life that he was never a proper fairy tale character, but just the protagonist of a weird little nonsensical nursery rhyme, and has devoted himself to the pursuit of magical objects, just so he can have the pleasure of depriving others of them. And the hidden gold they're all chasing, thanks to a most bizarre map that changes the landscape itself to reflect the personality of the individual holding it, is a Wishing Star that crashed on Earth some time back, and has just one - wait for it - last wish to give up. For Puss, this couldn't come at a better time, since he has recently used up his eighth life, and is finding that his customary braggadocio is much less fun when he can't run around recklessly endangering himself. And he's in extra-dire need of some more lives, since he's currently being stalked by a big bad wolf bounty hunter (Wagner Moura) who is possibly/probably the embodiment of Death Itself.
This is perfectly solid for kids' movie adventure - you can see the resolutions to all of the character arcs from pretty far away, but not in a way that makes them therefore boring, and I appreciate that this isn't playing such a manic game of "spot the fairy tale reference" as most of the films in its parent series: that's mostly relegated to the first act, after which it becomes pretty much exclusively a cross-cutting story of Puss, Goldilocks, and Jack, the latter of whom has a Mad Max: Fury Road style war rig to go along with his disgusting pasty skin. The various writers who tinkered on this enough to get credit over its many years of development (screenplay by Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow, from a story by Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler) have left it with your basic "family is where you find it" narrative, which is threaded across all three of the parallel plots, in different registers. There's something almost, dare I say, clean about the script of The Last Wish, a sort of classic-feeling efficiency and tidiness that makes it feel like an actual movie and not just jammed-together collection of shrill jokes, as is so very often the case for even the better DreamWorks comedies. For that matter, it's a pretty damn good comedy - the funniest movie of 2022, I'd even say, not that the competition has been fierce. The cynical irony of early DreamWorks so robustly typified by the Shrek movies is almost completely absent, the rude humor is limited to a couple of spots where somebody says "sh-" and is cut off, as well as a gag about litter boxes that's so meaningfully tied into Puss's character arc that it almost doesn't register that it is, at heart, a "haha, poop" gag. The Talking Cricket (Kevin McCann) from Pinocchio - not a fairy tale, but this franchise already fucked that up years ago - shows up as a parody of Jimmy Stewart at his most "aw shucks" folksy, growing more terrified with every scene as he finds Jack Horner to be a bloodthirsty maniac beyond the help for any conscience; it's a pretty one-note joke, the but the note is great, and McCann somehow turns out by far the best of the three Crickets to have shown up in 2022, blowing right by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's awful impression of Cliff Edwards in Disney's Pinocchio remake, conceived with far more clarity of purpose than Ewan McGregor's diffuse take on the character in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.
Clean storytelling and well-above-par humor aren't the reasons that Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has immediately landed near the top of my DreamWorks rankings, though. They help, to be sure; the film is charming, heartfelt, cute, and funny. But it is also drop-dead gorgeous, and I was not expecting this. It is apparently thanks to production designer Nate Wragg that the film boasts its extraordinary stylised look, which relies on deliberately low-detail texturing to make all of the characters feel a little more like paintings than CGI characters: everything is soft, a little low-resoution, a bit mottled. The goal was for an aesthetic that would subliminally call to mind the illustrations in a beloved childhood picture book, and I guess it sort of gets there, but where it stands out the most, I think, is never in its fantasy landscapes, gorgeous as those are; nor is it in the characters, who are so much more attractive than the humans in any Shrek feature ever have been, thanks to the new aesthetic freeing them from the straitjacket of photorealism. The most striking imagery in the movie, I think, is pretty consistently built around the Big Bad Wolf, who is surrounded by fuzzy, painterly flames and has sharp red almond eyes glaring out of his diffuse, fuzzy face. The plot somewhat uncertainly requires him to be both a character and a concept, a dogged bounty hunter and also a cosmic force, and while I do think Moura's excellent vocal performance, ethereal and threatening, helps with that, it really is mostly just the look of the character that makes that conflicting, even unresolved concept work out. He creates abstraction in the middle of scenes that already feel a little skewed towards painterly unreality as it is.
Another simply tremendous thing about The Last Wish is that director Joel Crawford and co-director Januel Mercado are going all-out with the sweeping camera - this is one of the most Spider-Verse things about the film. It is a kinetic, constantly-moving film, and the virtual camera is constantly racing around virtual sets with a charging, adventurous restlessness that keeps propelling the movie forward such that the characters barely seem able to keep up, and we with them, and it's all just very breathless and exhilarating. And this is intensified during the handful of action setpieces, where the film pulls out its boldest gesture of all: reducing the framerate to 12 FPS, or maybe even 8 FPS, creating a staccato, choppy look that makes it feel like the film has suddenly turned into a kind of weird version of bullet time. This happens in the middle of shots sometimes; at one point, it's even the case that the action is in this reduced framerate while, in the same shot, Jack continues moving at 24 fps, since he's not actually engaged in the action in that moment. I would be unable to explain in concrete words why this gesture, which after all makes the movement less fluid, should make the action feel so much more acute and present and exciting; maybe it's that every frame feels like its own dramatic pose (certainly, the way that the action also pivots into more stylised camera angles contributes to this), maybe it's the sense of stepping out of reality, sort of like watching slow motion without it actually being slow; maybe it's just that it reads as being more akin to Japanese animation, which is already better at action than American animation. Whatever is doing it, it's a startling and excitingly unconventional choice that gives The Last Wish some of the most dazzling animated setpieces in the history of the CG medium. If it were more persistent, I think we'd have a proper masterpiece of animated action-adventure on hour hands. As it is, I'm not sure that we don't. But in this moment, I'm only willing to go as far as "the most exciting CG animation in four years", and, I mean, that's still a pretty damn big claim.
Reviews in this series
Shrek (Adamson & Jenkins, 2001)
Shrek the Third (Miller, 2007)
Shrek Forever After (Mitchell, 2010)
Puss in Boots (Miller, 2011)
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Crawford, 2022)
Other films in this series, yet to be reviewed
Shrek 2 (Adamson & Asbury & Vernon, 2004)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
To be clear, I'm speaking entirely about the film's animation. Script-wise, this is, if anything, DreamWorks Animation's version of Tangled: as we are told in voiceover right at the start, delivered by none other than the swashbuckling cat adventurer Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) himself, there's a magical whatsit that everybody is chasing after, and in the course of finding it, the rakish lothario Puss will find himself confronted with the possibility that his roguelike ways aren't making him as happy as settling down with a gorgeous woman who's too good for him would be. The latter part isn't in the voice-over, I should say, it's just the plot. Most of all, this is DreamWorks Animation's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, almost explicitly so (and, indeed, it is explicit if you count the fact that the filmmakers have claimed that inspiration in interviews), with a single, extremely important lift from For a Few Dollars More in the form of a haunting musical refrain that recurs as a precursor the villain's appearances.
The good in this case consists Puss himself, as well as his former lover, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), and a stupid, purehearted little nameless dog (Harvey Guillén) who aggressively befriends Puss while the cat is briefly trying out retirement in the home of a dotty old cat lady named Mama Luna (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). The ugly are Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears - Papa (Ray Winstone), Mama (Olivia Colman), and Baby (Samson Kayo) - here reimagined as a Guy Ritchie-esque Cockney crime family, and to be fair, most of that reimagining was done simply by fact of casting Winstone. The bad is Big Jack Horner (John Mulaney), who has been nursing a grudge his whole life that he was never a proper fairy tale character, but just the protagonist of a weird little nonsensical nursery rhyme, and has devoted himself to the pursuit of magical objects, just so he can have the pleasure of depriving others of them. And the hidden gold they're all chasing, thanks to a most bizarre map that changes the landscape itself to reflect the personality of the individual holding it, is a Wishing Star that crashed on Earth some time back, and has just one - wait for it - last wish to give up. For Puss, this couldn't come at a better time, since he has recently used up his eighth life, and is finding that his customary braggadocio is much less fun when he can't run around recklessly endangering himself. And he's in extra-dire need of some more lives, since he's currently being stalked by a big bad wolf bounty hunter (Wagner Moura) who is possibly/probably the embodiment of Death Itself.
This is perfectly solid for kids' movie adventure - you can see the resolutions to all of the character arcs from pretty far away, but not in a way that makes them therefore boring, and I appreciate that this isn't playing such a manic game of "spot the fairy tale reference" as most of the films in its parent series: that's mostly relegated to the first act, after which it becomes pretty much exclusively a cross-cutting story of Puss, Goldilocks, and Jack, the latter of whom has a Mad Max: Fury Road style war rig to go along with his disgusting pasty skin. The various writers who tinkered on this enough to get credit over its many years of development (screenplay by Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow, from a story by Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler) have left it with your basic "family is where you find it" narrative, which is threaded across all three of the parallel plots, in different registers. There's something almost, dare I say, clean about the script of The Last Wish, a sort of classic-feeling efficiency and tidiness that makes it feel like an actual movie and not just jammed-together collection of shrill jokes, as is so very often the case for even the better DreamWorks comedies. For that matter, it's a pretty damn good comedy - the funniest movie of 2022, I'd even say, not that the competition has been fierce. The cynical irony of early DreamWorks so robustly typified by the Shrek movies is almost completely absent, the rude humor is limited to a couple of spots where somebody says "sh-" and is cut off, as well as a gag about litter boxes that's so meaningfully tied into Puss's character arc that it almost doesn't register that it is, at heart, a "haha, poop" gag. The Talking Cricket (Kevin McCann) from Pinocchio - not a fairy tale, but this franchise already fucked that up years ago - shows up as a parody of Jimmy Stewart at his most "aw shucks" folksy, growing more terrified with every scene as he finds Jack Horner to be a bloodthirsty maniac beyond the help for any conscience; it's a pretty one-note joke, the but the note is great, and McCann somehow turns out by far the best of the three Crickets to have shown up in 2022, blowing right by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's awful impression of Cliff Edwards in Disney's Pinocchio remake, conceived with far more clarity of purpose than Ewan McGregor's diffuse take on the character in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.
Clean storytelling and well-above-par humor aren't the reasons that Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has immediately landed near the top of my DreamWorks rankings, though. They help, to be sure; the film is charming, heartfelt, cute, and funny. But it is also drop-dead gorgeous, and I was not expecting this. It is apparently thanks to production designer Nate Wragg that the film boasts its extraordinary stylised look, which relies on deliberately low-detail texturing to make all of the characters feel a little more like paintings than CGI characters: everything is soft, a little low-resoution, a bit mottled. The goal was for an aesthetic that would subliminally call to mind the illustrations in a beloved childhood picture book, and I guess it sort of gets there, but where it stands out the most, I think, is never in its fantasy landscapes, gorgeous as those are; nor is it in the characters, who are so much more attractive than the humans in any Shrek feature ever have been, thanks to the new aesthetic freeing them from the straitjacket of photorealism. The most striking imagery in the movie, I think, is pretty consistently built around the Big Bad Wolf, who is surrounded by fuzzy, painterly flames and has sharp red almond eyes glaring out of his diffuse, fuzzy face. The plot somewhat uncertainly requires him to be both a character and a concept, a dogged bounty hunter and also a cosmic force, and while I do think Moura's excellent vocal performance, ethereal and threatening, helps with that, it really is mostly just the look of the character that makes that conflicting, even unresolved concept work out. He creates abstraction in the middle of scenes that already feel a little skewed towards painterly unreality as it is.
Another simply tremendous thing about The Last Wish is that director Joel Crawford and co-director Januel Mercado are going all-out with the sweeping camera - this is one of the most Spider-Verse things about the film. It is a kinetic, constantly-moving film, and the virtual camera is constantly racing around virtual sets with a charging, adventurous restlessness that keeps propelling the movie forward such that the characters barely seem able to keep up, and we with them, and it's all just very breathless and exhilarating. And this is intensified during the handful of action setpieces, where the film pulls out its boldest gesture of all: reducing the framerate to 12 FPS, or maybe even 8 FPS, creating a staccato, choppy look that makes it feel like the film has suddenly turned into a kind of weird version of bullet time. This happens in the middle of shots sometimes; at one point, it's even the case that the action is in this reduced framerate while, in the same shot, Jack continues moving at 24 fps, since he's not actually engaged in the action in that moment. I would be unable to explain in concrete words why this gesture, which after all makes the movement less fluid, should make the action feel so much more acute and present and exciting; maybe it's that every frame feels like its own dramatic pose (certainly, the way that the action also pivots into more stylised camera angles contributes to this), maybe it's the sense of stepping out of reality, sort of like watching slow motion without it actually being slow; maybe it's just that it reads as being more akin to Japanese animation, which is already better at action than American animation. Whatever is doing it, it's a startling and excitingly unconventional choice that gives The Last Wish some of the most dazzling animated setpieces in the history of the CG medium. If it were more persistent, I think we'd have a proper masterpiece of animated action-adventure on hour hands. As it is, I'm not sure that we don't. But in this moment, I'm only willing to go as far as "the most exciting CG animation in four years", and, I mean, that's still a pretty damn big claim.
Reviews in this series
Shrek (Adamson & Jenkins, 2001)
Shrek the Third (Miller, 2007)
Shrek Forever After (Mitchell, 2010)
Puss in Boots (Miller, 2011)
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Crawford, 2022)
Other films in this series, yet to be reviewed
Shrek 2 (Adamson & Asbury & Vernon, 2004)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
