Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a 2022 animated adventure film from Dreamworks Animation Studios and is the latest installment in the Shrek franchise.

How can something be even better than you had imagined?

I had heard many good things about Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. While it had seemed like a nothing of a movie to me, a desperate attempt by Dreamworks to continue a franchise long dead, suddenly reviews came in. It was praised through the roof for how tight, profound, hilarious, artful, and character driven it was.

Dreamworks

“Alright,” I thought, “I’ll give it a chance!” I was genuinely excited to see a good Dreamworks movie again. After some letdowns from them like Kung Fu Panda 3 and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, I was ready for Dreamworks to pull out all the stops. I delayed it for awhile, seeing it come up on our Peacock account.

I had high hopes. While I doubt many of the same animators, screenwriters, storyboarders, and the like are there as almost 30 years ago, this is a top animation studio. The Prince of Egypt. Shrek. Shrek 2. How to Train Your Dragon. Kung Fu Panda. Megamind. Kung Fu Panda 2. These guys and girls have some of the highest highs in good family adventure movies that don’t shy away from great characters and interesting premises.

Dreamworks shows what family movies can be. You don’t need to hide adult things in a children’s story for it to be good. “Hold the phone, what about Shrek?” Those references are enjoyable definitely: but Shrek still stands or falls not on the references but the story of Shrek and Fiona and Donkey. You can create a good story that watchers will grow in appreciation over time. And when they fill them with references, so much the better.

They’re not perfect. Some of their movies are just B-movie kids fair. For every hit, they’ve had a miss or two. While people will disagree over the misses and the hits, and there is much of their filmography I haven’t seen, I think anyone would agree Shrek isn’t the same as Shrek the Third.

That’s why I had my fingers crossed going into Puss in Boots. Is this a Shrek or a Shrek the Third? Or just something in the middle? But I had high hopes. Dreamworks could pull it off.

My expectations were more than surpassed.

The Movie

This movie succeeds on so many different levels.

Where this movie really succeeds is in juggling.

It manages to juggle so much. It juggles characters by repeatedly pairing or tripling characters that bring out the best and worst in each other. An obvious pairing is Big Jack Horner and Jimminy Cricket. A minor villain, Big Jack Horner is a psychopath with no conscience and no redeeming qualities. He is, however, hilarious in his complete lack of morality, and the pairing with the Conscience Cricket yields amazing laughs as well as funny character insight into Jack. But that’s not the only pairing. Goldilocks has different relationships with her adopted mother, father, and brother bear, each character unique while each character working within the group. Puss is in quite a few: Perrito and Puss, Kitty Softpaws and Puss, the Wolf and Puss, these and more bring out the best and the worst and the best laughs in each character. And this movie has a ton of characters, and yet manages to say interesting and profound things about many of them. It’s this pairing, and the juggling between these pairings, that makes the movie incredibly efficient at only 90 minutes.

I can’t forget the voice acting. Though many characters are over the top, their performances bring so much fun paired with so much nuance. Goldilocks gets an arc. Goldilocks gets emotion. Kitty, little more than a female Puss in the movie from twelve years ago, has an engaging arc that ties perfectly into Puss’s. Special mention to Perrito, the little dog pretending to be a cat, who doesn’t get an arc so much as propel the arcs of other characters as we discover more about how he sees the world. He’s a static character, yes, but he’s static at its absolute best. I love him. Puss in Boots, with his incredible accent and varied voice, gets some deeply profound and adventurous moments. Everyone’s at the top of their game and bringing the best performances out of their peers. The actors are paired with great material and great variety of emotion, and the characters shine.

It also incredibly pairs tones. The movie jumps from colorful action adventure, to rioting humor, to chilling horror (yes, horror), and does them all masterfully. Tone is a really hard aspect of film to quantify. You can quantify contradictions in world building or character action. Tone is hard to do. It’s a problem people have felt with Disney Marvel movies for a long time, but it’s hard to put a finger on. But this movie is a textbook on how to do it right. Humor is given enough time to breath. Drama adventure plays out, complimented by in character jokes but never under minded. And suddenly, you’re having a good time and you hear a whistle, the camera turns, the color palette changes, and you know the Wolf has come to town to haunt Puss. While that adventure had enough time dedicated to it for you to smile, and it’s not undercut by the horror, the horror still comes as surprising and terrifying. It’s a masterclass in tone.

It’s also a masterclass in presentation. The animation is vibrant and lively, inspired by the style of Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse. It’s also a juggling act; it shifts between more cartoony and stylized, to muted and drained. The opening scene is fun and colorful as Puss and Boots is at the top of his game. Running from the wolf in the forest in the famous panic attack scene, the style is more muted. Even the battles are different; fight scenes and action lower the frame rate of characters. While this could be distracting, instead it skillfully serves to highlight the movements of the characters so their actions don’t blur. It’s a juggling of different animation tools in a way I don’t think Dreamworks ever really has before.

Finally, it successfully juggles deconstruction with reconstruction. It’s easy to tear apart a franchise. We’ve seen it with Star Wars. A creator takes the character or world and instead just says, “Here’s how they SUCK!” And they replace them with characters or worlds just like the previous, but without flaws that make them so much more flawed. Yet somehow, this movie deconstructs that legend of Puss in Boots. For the first time, he is afraid. He runs. He finds an enemy he cannot defeat: death. At the last of his nine lives, he finally is afraid of the end. Puss in Boots gets so low and humiliated. But then the movie gets amazing, and reconstructs Puss and gives him multiple moments of sheer awesomeness built on far more solid ground. Not pride, not disregard for his own life, but care and concern and fighting so hard for this life. He’s made it, and it’s amazing to see a fun character who I remember fondly being an amazing character.

Conclusion

You need to see this movie. It’s incredible. It’s Dreamworks at the best of their craft, juggling characters, emotion, tones, animation, and deconstruction. Puss in Boots has never been better.