Review: Puss In Boots The Last Wish

"cada cosa calculada" - shakira

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a spinoff film in the Shrek franchise. The first Shrek film, a fairytale parody, released in 2001 and became an artifact of millenial-zoomer cusp childhoods. Fairytale in the Shrek sense means words that Americans have in their head form nursery rhyme songs, and Disney characters that have fallen into public domain. There’s three blind mice, a magic mirror, and Robin Hood. Pinocchio appears with a silly weird kid voice and when he tells lies his nose grows like the story but his lies are embarrassing things. There’s a sweet and horny lady dragon who Shrek’s sidekick Donkey falls in love with. Shrek goes on adventures with lots of jokes and marries the girl at the end. Shrek achieves its goals but they're silly goals. 

For a children’s comedy from 2001, Shrek had an incredible lifespan. The British people love it. Along the Thames in Central London a beautiful building was converted into a giant “Shrek experience”. I don’t understand my fellow man across the Atlantic well enough to explain this.

Discord users love making jokes about Shrek. The character not the franchise. More than remembered for his film content, Shrek is remembered as a silly ogre who is green. Video game teens say “it’s ogre” as a pun on “it’s over”, though that phrase is never said in the films. Shrek holding a camera, which is not a frame from any Shrek film, is a meme image for putting someone in your cringe compilation.

2004’s Shrek 2 introduced Puss In Boots, an orange latino kitty with a sword, a fancy hat, and of course, beautiful black boots. Half Garfield, half Zorro. He was a fan-favorite character so in 2011 Dreamworks made a Puss In Boots spinoff film, which was the last film in the Shrek franchise for a decade. Eleven years later, they resumed the series with Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. I presume Shrek’s memetic persistence helped give the confidence to make this film after such a long break. 

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In the story of The Last Wish, a falling star has hit the world, and it will grant a wish to whoever first reaches it and recites a nursery rhyme. Many characters pursue the wishing star for selfish reasons, including Puss in Boots. We first see Puss In Boots as a great but arrogant hero, singing a song about his deeds in front of a crowd as he slays a giant. After the fight he is crushed to death by a falling bell, which takes him to his last of nine cat-lives, a very cute joke. Without the safety of his extra lives, Puss is stalked by Death in wolf form, who wants to end Puss’s life. The film has Death explain his sincerity level: “I don’t mean it metaphorically or rhetorically or poetically or theoretically or in any other fancy way. I’m Death, straight up.” 

Puss hides from Death with an old cat lady, which is a humiliation, but he chooses adventure when he learns of the fallen star. He plans to spend the wish restoring his nine lives. Puss flees from Death on his quest for the wish, but at the end he faces his fears and takes on Death in combat, like the great hero he was at the start of the film. Death is delighted that Puss has grown and lets him live. Puss does not take the wish, opting to live the one life he has.

No one takes the titular wish in this film. Villain Jack Horner plans to use the wish for evil world domination, and the side characters unite to take him down. The side characters realize they already had what they search for without the magical wish, like Puss In Boots did. Puss’s black cat girlfriend, named Kitty Southpaws, was spurned by Puss before the start of this film because Puss was not vulnerable enough to let another person into his legendary adventure. Kitty wishes for another person she can finally trust, but finds she already has her person she can trust in Puss, after his character growth on their adventure together.

Also pursuing the wish is Goldilocks and the Three Bears, reimagining the famous story as a criminal family who adopted Goldilocks after she wandered into their house. They chase Puss In Boots but sometimes work with him. Goldilocks rides the bears and orders them around, and they have a playful dynamic, but Goldilocks secretly resents her adopted bear family, who talks like British chavs, because they are shallow and dumb. She wishes for a perfect family but at the end finds she already has what she wants in the unconditional love her adopted family has given her.

And then there's a dog character who befriends Puss when he’s in hiding, at his lowest point. The dog is ugly and talks like a therapist, constant positive affirmation to anything. Everyone hates him so he doesn’t even have a name. He never wishes for anything because he so cherishes life, except he occasionally remarks that it would be nice to have a name. He too finds his wish already fulfilled in that he has the nickname “Perrito'' that Puss calls him through the film. 

The Last Wish has such remarkable self-control that it made me uncomfortable. It deftly introduces a reasonable number of characters, steers them through morally similar thematic arcs through a fun series of set pieces, and holds its tone the whole time. The animation is more stylized and creative than any of the Shrek films. It has references, enough to get people into the theater on brand recognition, but not tastelessly dropped in a way that’s gross or would alienate current kids, who were born after 2011 and have no nostalgia for the originals. It feels meticulously calibrated as a film kids could enjoy, while Letterboxd users could write their one sentence review to say it’s shockingly good. I admire Dreamworks for aiming perfectly at their target, but it's scary and boring that they knew precisely where the target was. Advanced basketball statistics proved that players should primarily take three-pointers and layups, and The Last Wish feels like similar refinement culture optimization. 

The diligent calibration reminded me of last summer’s Minions: Rise of Gru, which is also a movie resurrecting a franchise which people remember less for its plot but more for its memetic aftermath, in that case the little yellow minions. Rise of Gru is not as thematically strong or well-animated as The Last Wish, but it stays in control of its narrative. It had a promotional soundtrack that featured Tame Impala, Diana Ross, Phoebe Bridgers, and St. Vincent, which proved their kid’s movie’s tastefulness to adults a different way.

It’s a risk to put a big budget movie in a theater now, in a world where people like to be inside on their phones. With the internet people like to stay inside more, but studios know what’s in their heads, which they can use to pull them outside. Safe reboot kid’s movies that also appeal to the adult audience who saw the original movies as kids are the result. Even though the products are pleasant enough films to watch, I leave feeling gross for having been demographically identified. Maybe Puss In Boots: The Last Wish was the wrong place to expect something visceral and brave, but I didn’t expect a movie this carefully calculated.