Puss in Boots: The Last Wish Review!

Alright! Today I'm reviewing Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the sequel to 2011's Puss in Boots, which itself was a spin-off from the overall Shrek franchise. This movie sees everyone's favorite sword-wielding cat grapple with his mortality after using eight of his nine lives, thus setting off on a quest to wish upon a star and gain more lives, reuniting with old friends and making new ones alike while occasionally sparring with Death himself. 

Right off the table, it must be known that The Last Wish is genuinely fantastic through and through, superseding expectations in its animation, humor, villains, and heart. It's a solid time at the movies through and through, and with a tight hour and forty-minute runtime that I cannot express my appreciation for enough. With more and more blockbusters surpassing the 2-hour mark and even venturing into the three-hour territory, it's nice to return to animation that doesn't bloat and drag under the weight of sequels and spin-offs. It was a quick and effective runtime that, at the exact moment I thought it was dragging, kicked into high gear with an adrenaline-inducing finale. Fantastic timing on the movie's part. 

Also appreciated was the visual style of the film. Once again, compared to contemporaries, The Last Wish exceeds all expectations by eschewing the typical photorealistic style popularized by Pixar in the early 2000s, favoring a more artsy "painted" style a la Spider-Verse that is perfectly fit for a fairy tale. Some of the more beautiful shots reminded me of The Wizard of Oz's painted backgrounds, which I thoroughly appreciated. It’s also important to give a ton of love to the design of Puss in Boots - easily one of the best anthropomorphized designs ever. Every facial detail is perfectly captured yet still distinctly catlike, it’s amazing to watch.

Also amazing to watch is the rest of the movie. It still has the trademark Shrek fairytale satire that borders on edgy, but it’s also built off of fun character interactions and clever dialogue and line deliveries. It's gut bustingly hilarious for the majority of its runtime, although nothing matches the superb "day in the life" sequence where Puss takes down a giant with swashbuckling charm. Once the plot kicks into gear the jokes begin to slow down, which was somewhat disappointing but also allowed for the emotional beats to not be drowned in lame gags, an attribute lost in modern action films. 

The emotional beats in this movie are what make it work, and with that in mind, The Last Wish, like all good fairy tales, has a very clear lesson to be learned. At its core, Puss in Boots is a story about making the most of this life, about how we have to claw and bite to fight for it to make it truly worthwhile. It's also a story about coming to terms with mortality, hubris, families, and trust. It's a heartwarming and inspiring tale of bonding and friendship, a bona fide classic that could come to rival Shrek 2 given time. 

It also, and I am so happy to say this, has a villain. I have complained about animated movies not having strong villains for years, with most of them either having last-minute twist villains (Moana) or no villain at all (Also Moana). Puss in Boots has several villains, each fully taking advantage of their fairytale setting and their inherent absurdity. Goldilocks encapsulates the theme of family alongside Puss, Kitty, and Perritto. A grotesque Little Jack Horner serves as the movie's primary physical threat, while Death himself serves as the movie's thematic threat. Words fail to describe how much of a standout Death was in this movie. Everything about him - his voice, his design, weapons, whistling, dialogue, the rapid tone shifts, terrifying imagery, inescapable force of nature dread versus sympathetic attributes, and honor - all of it was pitch perfect for a representation of Death. 

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a fantastic movie. It's the best movie of 2022, the best animated film since Spider-Verse, and the best DreamWorks movie since How to Train Your Dragon in 2010. This is the type of movie that should make Disney afraid, a crowd-pleasing smash hit that relied on word-of-mouth to get going and has healthy box office numbers ($90 million budget, $393 million box office). It's all deserved, but the fact that Puss in Boots stands so tall in a year when Lightyear and Strange World fell flat on their faces (Combined budgets of $335-$380 million, $299 million box office) makes the victory so much sweeter. Puss in Boots is the hero 2022 needed.

Overall, I give Puss in Boots: The Last Wish a 10/10. "Shockingly emotional, hilarious, and terrifying, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a touching story about mortality and making the most of the time you have."

See you, gato.