Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)

Only shooting stars break the mold

It really isn’t that much of a surprise that Puss in Boots 2 is good. DreamWorks Animation has semi-sneakily been the most adventurous mainstream American animation studio of the past decade. What is a surprise is just how good this actually is: In addition to being a provocative reckoning with obsolescence, it’s a kinetic and occasionally trippy adventure across a morphing “wishscape” that is the coolest thing DreamWorks has ever animated.

Eleven years after Puss in Boots 1, the setup is that Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) has spent eight of his nine lives without once stopping to count, and a doctor’s visit puts that last, eternal death in front of him. A bounty hunter turns up whistling, with two sickles and a red glow behind the eyes, and Puss discovers a sensation he has no framework for: his fur stands up and he runs. He loses his sword and buries the hat, the cape, the boots, everything that makes him Puss in Boots and not just a house pet, retiring to a cat lady’s house to eat from a bowl.

The bounty hunter is Death (Wagner Moura), the big GR himself, and he is one of the best villains in animation history: you’d have to go back to the Disney Renaissance to find one as memorable in menacing stature and imagery. What makes him work isn’t just the design, though the design has genuinely rippled outward; Ryan Coogler has said those red eyes and that demeanor gave him the kernel of his vampires in Sinners. It’s that Death is structurally integrated in a genius way. He shows up maybe five times across the film, spaced far enough apart that you relax into the adventure and forget he’s out there, and every appearance yanks Puss backward into cowardice. This Death isn’t a far-off obstacle at the end of the story; he’s a force pulling the hero towards oblivion right here and now. The fear of Death (and death) prevents Puss from being a hero. The resolution, of course, is that terrifying human impossibility of accepting mortality: Puss stops running — not a conqueror’s victory, since nobody beats Death, but an acceptance of defeat and a corresponding new outlook on life. That it meaningfully achieves so much character growth is an impressive feat for any movie, let alone a family cartoon.

The plot proper is a three-way scramble for a fallen wishing star hidden in a pocket dimension, and the map to it reshapes the terrain around whoever’s holding it. The action scenes transform into super-stylized, flying-camera, anime-inspired battles (explicitly cribbed from Sony’s Spider-Verse frame-skip, space-reorienting schema), often in inventive settings, and the wishscape supplies an unbroken run of them: the ground crumbling and reassembling itself into somebody else’s psychology, obstacles custom-built out of each character’s demons and dreams. Sometimes the morphing itself provides the conflict, shifting land masses separating characters like a hyper-speed continental drift.

It’s very funny, too. Big Jack Horner (John Mulaney) is a nursery-rhyme also-ran nursing a grudge about not being a proper fairy tale creature. This is a good gag by itself, and it ties the film back to the first Shrek. Mulaney plays the grotesquely designed villain as a man with no interior whatsoever, furnishing an inventive array of fairy tale-based gizmos. He’s shadowed by the Ethical Bug (Heitor Pereira), a conscience he keeps in a jar who speaks in an unimpeachable Jimmy Stewart, gradually realizing he’s been assigned to try and guide a psychopath.

The film’s secondary plots provide perfect counterweight: Puss’s reunion with Kitty Softpaws (Selma Hayek) provides another angle on Puss’s life of regret, while doubling down on the romantic chemistry between Hayek and Banderas. Meanwhile, the third group hunting for the wishing star are Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears in which Goldilocks confronts a variation on the deep loneliness that Puss is feeling. Despite being a tertiary thread, Goldilocks’ arc is a touching little story.

Joel Crawford, a rising DreamWorks maestro (he also helmed Croods 2 and a Trolls special), directs, with Januel Mercado co-directing, and the film’s visuals hold together with remarkable flair and vision: smeared and choppy when the action starts, smooth when the film slows down. A sequence where Puss confronts his eight previous deaths, each a different flavor of vanity, is perhaps the best-staged scene in the entire Shrek franchise; or maybe it’s the acrobatic opening song and kaiju mini-thriller. Crawford and Mercado not only ensure the film looks good, but that it has a brilliantly engaging tone from start to finish and an excellent pace.

It simply can’t be overstated how much of a leap forward The Last Wish provides the Shrek franchise in visuals, making the slightly stiff animation of the previous entries look positively elementary. It takes the joyful hues of Trolls and the controlled mayhem of Boss Baby and synthesizes it into a coherent, well-edited, stylized whole. Flashes of surreality and clever editing enhance the flavor.

The film’s knocks are small: the showdown features two climaxes when one would do, and Death’s arrives first, which is backwards given how much more he means than Horner. And I can’t help but think the movie is a little too fond of Horner in general: He gets terrific amount of invention, but he’s played at a shrill enough pitch that a little less might have gone a long way. Also, the adorable eyes gag is still here, still not all that funny, nineteen years on. (At least Perrito’s flubbed attempt is a mild subversion.)

So let me put the claims on the record without hedging. This is the best movie in the Shrek franchise, which is not as high of a bar as one would hope six movies in. So here’s a higher one: it’s the best DreamWorks movie since How to Train Your Dragon, and in the same tier as its sequels. Widen it out past the studio and it’s the best mainstream American animated movie since at least the first Spider-Verse, and I’m not even sure at first blush which of those two come out on top. And in all seriousness, dropping the qualifier about animation entirely, it’s a contender for the best film of a strong 2022; I ranked it second when the year wrapped.

What more could you want? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but: Bring on Shrek 5.

Is It Good?

Exceptionally Good (7/8)

---

Related Articles

• Podcast Episode: Shrekisode, Part 2 - You're asking a lot of me

---

Awards, Honors, & Rankings

• Shrek Franchise Ranked - #1
• Favorites of the First Half of the 2020s - Selection
• The B.A.D.S. (2022) - Best Voice Actor (Wagner Moura) (Winner)
• The B.A.D.S. (2022) - Best Song ("Fearless Hero") (Nominee)
• The B.A.D.S. (2022) - Best Animated Feature (Winner)
• The B.A.D.S. (2022) - Best Picture (Nominee)
• Top 10 Movies of 2022 - #2

---

Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.