Puss in Boots: The Last Wish Review: DreamWorks Delivers One of 2022’s Best Animated Movies

2022 was a great year for animation. Whether it was the short film The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse or the multiple shorts from Love, Death + Robots Volume 3,  animated adaptations like Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio or Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, spin-offs of popular franchises such as Lightyear, first-time directors such as Domee Shi with Turning Red, Pierre Perifel with The Bad Guys, or Daniel Fleischer Camp with Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, established directors like Richard Linklater with Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Odyssey. Honestly, I could go on and on with examples, but you get the idea.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is no exception. It’s an animated film competently directed by second-time director Joel Crawford, boasts a screenplay with surprising emotional depth and nuance, great vocal performances, is a showcase for animation as a medium, and oozes style.

However, I’d be lying if I didn’t have reservations about watching Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. My most recent experience with the Shrek franchise was Shrek the Third, and that movie was so bad that despite growing up on the franchise, I didn’t watch anything associated with Shrek until now.

So, what made me want to watch it? Well, for starters, it was free with my Peacock subscription, and it was getting good reviews and Oscar buzz. That’s only a couple of small reasons, though. What sold me on it was that I got the sense from everything I saw from the film was a large departure from the franchises’ bathroom humor, opting instead to be a much more serious film.

Don’t get me wrong - the film still has a ton of humor. The humor in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish ensures the latest entry in the Shrek franchise can be enjoyed by young kids with some sight gags and the things we come to expect from this franchise’s brand of humor.  However, a few times, I laughed at a clever joke or two that I wasn’t expecting from this film. In that way, DreamWorks, or in this case, Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow, the screenplay writers, have potentially cracked the code for what makes Pixar’s jokes so successful.

On that same note, after watching this film, I came away with the main impression that the writers have found a way to inject more adult themes between the humor. The film opts to differentiate itself from being pigeonholed into this box by making the crux of the film’s story a journey where Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) is on the last of his nine lives and must find a mystical wishing star to restore his other eight lives. This bleak tone allows many more avenues for the story to travel on with its characters. For example, a character has an anxiety attack. It’s an unusually tender moment, but that’s the benefit of treating animation as a medium to tell stories with rather than a genre predominately filled with loud and obnoxious characters for children to laugh at.

That isn’t to say there aren’t characters to laugh at. Notably the duo of “Big” Jack Horner (John Mulaney) and the Ethical Bug (Kevin McCann); in most of the scenes the two share a call-and-response kind of relationship, where the Ethical Bug is simply reacting comically to the overt evilness of Horner. Despite that simplistic relationship, even those jokes managed to land for me because there was an underlying emotional motivation to the relationship instead of the Ethical Bug screaming at the top of his lungs all the time and expecting the audience to laugh.

There’s also Perrito (Harvey Guillén), who would usually be treated as the type of character a studio would promote heavily for merchandising. While he certainly has his moments where I wanted to skip forward a few seconds, the reason I didn’t is because of Guillén’s performance late into the film, where we come to understand his backstory. It’s a simple bit of storytelling, but one that worked exceptionally well for me to the point where if DreamWorks wanted to continue his inclusion in the franchise, I’d be all for it.

Other vocal performances I enjoyed were Florence Pugh as Goldilocks, Olivia Colman as Mama Bear, Ray Winstone as Papa Bear, Samson Kayo as Baby Bear, Wagner Moura as the Wolf, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mama Luna. All of these actors give this intense emotional honesty to their performances that is rarely seen, and I would love to see more actors try this now and again. It works every time I see it tried, especially in animated films you don’t expect it from.

Another thing I didn’t expect is how great the animation looks. To put it plainly, the designs are as if you took the CG animation from the Shrek films and blended in some traditional hand-drawn animation, giving each frame a storybook look. The big trick that seems to be used in the animation of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish appears to be animating different characters or objects at different frame rates.

An early example is a scene with a giant where the giant is being animated 24 times a second, Puss in Boots is being animated 12 times a second, and objects are being animated eight times a second. An animator might need to check my math, but the essential thing you need to know is that it communicates that the more you animate something, the faster the viewer will perceive the character or object’s motion. In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Miles was animated 12 times per second while training to be Spider-Man and was only animated 24 times per second when he became Spider-Man.

All of this comes together to produce one of the best animated movies of 2022. I hope this is just the start of what I think could be a renaissance of animated movies that learn to craft stories for all ages, advance the medium, and give us some great performances.

★★★★★

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is available to purchase on Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, and digitally (where it’s also available to be rented). You can also stream it on Peacock until June or July of 2023, when it will be available to stream with a Netflix subscription. If theaters are more your thing, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is still available in 800+ theaters in the United States.

Until next time!

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