Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Year: 2022
Rating: PG
Length: 104 minutes / 1.73 hours
It’s honestly been so long since there have been any movies from the Shrek franchise. I had almost forgotten Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) was a sequel to a spinoff that came out 11 years ago. Animation has changed a lot in that time, and this movie shows that traditional CGI animated fare is now following a much different look. Even with the change in animation style, The Last Wish excels at the thing that made the Shrek movies great: unique takes on well-known fairy tales.
It surprised me how dark parts of this film were, considering its target audience. When the titular character has to come to terms with his own mortality in the form of death as a deadly sickle-wielding wolf, it gets perhaps a bit too scary for younger children. Sure, there are comic relief characters like Perrito (Harvey Guillén) to lighten the mood. However, I don’t know if I’ve run across an animated film quite like this that deals with hubris (among other heavy topics) in a way that children could understand.
With the MacGuffin of the “Last Wish,” the plot moved at a pretty good pace until the third act. Perhaps there were too many subplots to wrap up. Between the fundamental conflict of Puss (Antonio Banderas) wanting his lost lives back, Goldi (Florence Pugh) wanting her biological family back, and Jack Horner (John Mulaney) wanting raw power, there was a lot to resolve. And even the resolutions we got felt cliche for the setups they had. Still, this film is another great example of the sequel being better than the original. At the very least, it’s more memorable.
A creative take on fairy tales and weighty subject matter, I give Puss in Boots: The Last Wish 4.0 stars out of 5.
