1. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
There’s something to be said about the feeling of being taken so off guard by a film that it challenges your perception of movies from then after. This film looked great from the trailers I saw but of course a trailer can only showcase so much of a film’s merit aside from visual integrity and snippets of a well crafted script. No one was prepared for what this film had in store for them nor the film industry at large.
This film is a masterpiece. It is perfection in the form of a cat in cute thick boots and it’s an anomaly on all accounts. The fact that it exists often feels like something that should be a part of an empirical study. The fact that this brilliantly crafted film is the sixth in a line of Shrek adjacent films while being a sequel to a spin-off about the second side-character from Shrek 2 has officially left no other film in existence with any excuses for mediocrity.
The film stars Puss in Boots, played once again by Antonio Banderas, in his second theatrical release and he’s officially down to the last of his nine lives. He embarks on a journey to reclaim them by being the first to find the coveted wishing star. Of course, he isn’t the only one who wants to find it. A prize that bountiful comes with a whole host of people going after it and he’ll need to survive them all to make what he thinks his wish is to come true.
When I first saw this film, it was due to good word of mouth from social media outlets. After so many scattered messages of hearing how good it was and seeing how good it looked from the trailers, I did eventually sit down and watch it in the comfort of my own home.
Immediately after the film was done I ran downstairs and asked my brother and sister to come to the movie theater with me that same day so we could all see it together. I watched it again, that same exact day, and it strangely felt as though it had been a while since I had seen it. It honestly almost felt like I was watching it for the first time all over again.
I had never done that with a film before, not in my entire life. Watching a film for free and then immediately feeling the need to pay to see it again isn’t a feeling that comes often for most people. That’s never even happened with something I’m typically a much bigger fan of than any of these Shrek films, like Sonic the Hedgehog. It was pivotal that I saw this on the big screen.
There’s almost too much to admire here. This is a textbook example of how to take a flawed, overly confident character and make them the star of your show. Puss is arrogant and full of himself but never unlikeable due to how funny, daring, and charming he is. On top of that, after its first big set-piece, the film takes time to humble him quickly by setting him up against one of the most intense and terrifying antagonists in a family film this side of Shrek’s gritty fairy tale land. He is a wolf in a black parka and his name is Death.
Death (Wagner Moura) as a character hits all the marks one would need him to hit for the concept behind his involvement to land. It does so in ways that are so subtle that some of them had to be discovered by the internet later on. Yeah, he was in the crowd watching as Puss was about to frivolously sacrifice one of his nine lives again for the thrill of being called a legend. The red in his eyes, the relentless chase, the song he whistles, the SHIFT in tone from whatever is happening on screen to the personal tone he exudes due to his mere presence are all immaculate. He commands attention and is deserving of it because none can escape him and the film wants you to know it.
Death being a thing you can’t escape is something we all, of course, know and something we all need to grapple with at some point in our lives. It’s harder to do some days than it is on other days though. As we grow older I find myself looking at my parents and with each hug and fun afternoon we have together I can’t help but take an ominous glance towards the future where I’ll know they’ll be gone. I’ve found myself giving them both a hug and saying to myself “They’re still here” before heading off to work.
One day they won’t be and it’s tough to wrestle with that knowledge the further and further into the future I get. However, as Puss found out, it truly is about appreciating the life that you do have. Never stop fighting for the life you do have. Living in the moment does not mean throwing caution to the wind and tossing yourself off a building to see if you’ll survive. It means embracing the here and now so that when it’s all over you won’t leave any regrets behind.
Inevitably, there will be some. That’s the nature of the human mind but it’s definitely better to try for something that’ll improve it than to shrug and say you may as well not because we’ll all die anyway. As sad and scary as it may sound, death gives life purpose. The life you lead is shaped by the knowledge of inevitable demise.
The fact that this is something being expertly explored and talked about in a sequel to Puss in Boots has, again, left all other films with no excuse not to try.
The themes don’t just begin and end with death of course. Family is another big bullet point in this film as one of the key motivators for why living life is more important than just having a bunch of lives to stave off death. Finding and living for someone you can trust and call family helps give that life purpose. It’s what the main female lead, Kitty Softpaws, played by Salma Hayek Pinault, wants so desperately out of her life.
The last wish could grant her that but she began to realize along her journey that she could have that in Puss, as the journey changed him to finally be the kind of person she needed. Meanwhile, the heart of the film, a dog named Perrito, played by Harvey Guillén, is someone who knew this from birth. Kinship, kindness, and looking on the bright side of life is his M.O to an absurd and cartoonish degree. However, because it’s cranked up past 11 for him, it sells us hard on what he believes and how strongly he believes it. It’s to the point where he finds amusement in his backstory where he was tossed into a river inside of a sock with a rock in it by his former family. No one else would find that story funny and the last person that should is him but in his point of view he got a neat sweater out of it so it was a win-win.
Of course, even if Perrito is the heart of the film, the subplot that got my heart to ache the most was the one involving Goldilocks and the three bears. Goldie (Florence Pugh) and her family played by Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, and Samson Kayo respectively, are one of the prongs of folks after the wishing star and they embody the spirit of found family to a tee. Mama Bear was making me cry the most with the way she kept responding to Goldie’s advances, especially towards the end. It’s a heartwarming story about how the thing you’re looking for your whole life is often, sometimes already within reach. As someone who isn't immune to ignoring the happiness he’s seeking staring him in the face, it's been taxing coming to grips with how hard it can be to realize this. A book Goldie reads literally tells her what she wants if you pause the film and read the first letters of each sentence down the side like a crossword puzzle.
The third prong after the star is the internet’s favorite balloon boy of wistful evil, Jack Horner, played by John Mulaney. The poem that inspired him tells of Little Jack Horner sitting in a corner, eating a horner pie. He stuck his thumb in a plum and said “oh what a good boy am I”.
Except, no. He's an asshole.
His wicked machinations make him an exceedingly entertaining villain and one that cleared the drought for many online looking for a good bad guy to hate again.
It feels like it’s been well over a decade or so since we’ve had a villain quite like this in an animated feature and while I’m sure others do exist, it’ll be hard for them to top the kind of vigor and swagger this one has from merely taking a step on screen and smirking in the precise, devilish way he did. When it comes to the other best villains I can think of in animated features as of late, characters like Ernesto de la Cruz from Coco and Tamatoa from Moana come to mind but there are huge caveats associated with both of them that hold them back. Neither of them are in the film for anywhere near as long as Jack Horner is because the structure of the stories in those films didn’t allow for them to be. It makes sense that it felt so refreshing having a character like Jack come along.
It really was just nice to have an unapologetically evil, repugnant roach for a villain again. The fun that comes with loving to hate this guy breathes such new life into a movie going experience when, of course, you’re surrounded by flawed but mostly well-meaning characters on a journey to legitimately better themselves. This man, on the other hand, is responsible for all his men dying in terrible, gruesome ways and he simply does not care. All he wants is the wish that comes with recovering the coveted wishing star and no matter what Kevin McCann’s talking Cricket, an accidental companion on his personal journey here, tries to do or say the horrors that lie in that cold, dead heart of Jack’s prevails in the end. Until it doesn’t.
The film didn’t need to excuse Jack being an irredeemable monster but the fact that they went the extra mile by letting the audience know they knew what they were doing by having the cricket be a double act with Jack for the majority of the film shows the kind of talent we’re dealing with here. It is also true to life. Some people are just privileged and use that privilege to do awful things to people for no other reason than indulging in yet more selfish desire.
This film is special. It came out during a year of film where so much creativity felt lost or hindered either by studio meddling or a perceived lack of ambition. Scrounging for scraps and suffering through Disney’s inane attempts to remain relevant in the 2020s was making things feel hopeless. The fact that this film is as good as it is really does put it all into perspective for me though.
It’s not about sequels. It’s not about remakes. It’s not about franchises. It’s not even about live-action.
We bemoan and complain whenever any of those get announced but all of them have the capacity to be good so long as they’re being made with the intention of creating something good and having something to say rather than to just make money. If a film is good, made on a reasonable budget, and it’s well advertised, it’ll make money. The power of word of mouth is something not to be underestimated in this day in age. We’ve seen too many stories of success that come from a verbal boost of positivity to deny it. The Day the Earth Blew Up would have been a success if WB had properly backed it. A film with a 15 Million budget has no reason not to succeed in this day and age and despite not being advertised well it made a third of its budget back in one weekend. It could have worked.
Once again, this film is a masterpiece of work and even if money was the driving force behind why it was greenlit it definitely was not the driving force behind the process of its creation.
My wish is for all movies to be like this one. Not literally but figuratively. I want them all to strive for casting a bright light that shines its full potential on the world no matter what kind of film it is.
It's the pinnacle of what came out of the original spitefulness that led to the creation of Dreamworks. At the end of that road was this masterpiece and I, hopefully, wish to see more like it to come. So long as Dreamworks is still around to be a buffer between the next Illumination or Disney release, I feel as if there will always be hope for another film like this and, hopefully, those other studios can follow suit.
Thank you Dreamworks. I had a blast experiencing and re-experiencing all you had to offer.
