In the current climate of Hollywood, in which the maintenance of intellectual property rights often takes precedence over innovation, artistry, or even simple entertainment value, few prospects could seem dimmer than a belated sequel to a spin-off of the Shrek franchise. And yet, director Joel Crawford’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish defies the odds, vaulting over not only the low expectations that the wary filmgoer might’ve set for it, but achieving something all too rare in the realm of children’s animated features: genuine delight.
A pleasantly over-stuffed shaggy-dog tale that moves at a breakneck pace, The Last Wish opens with a rip-roaring swashbuckling musical sequence that evokes the hammy hyper-masculinity of Vincente Minnelli’s The Pirate. The dauntless Puss in Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) leads a sing-along ode to his own greatness before slaying a fearsome monster. But just as it seems Puss can do no wrong, he gets conked in the face by a bell and falls to his demise.
This death, the swaggering feline’s eighth, causes Puss to face up to his mortality, at least for a little while. In the film’s funniest sequence, he lies low in an overpopulated shelter run by a kooky cat lady named Mama Luna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), where he grows a retirement beard and is forced to queue up to use the house’s shared litterbox, “where dignity goes to die.” Eventually, though, Puss catches wind of a mythical Wishing Star, which, he hopes, will allow him to replenish his lost lives, so he teams up with a chipper young pup (Harvey Guillén) and his old flame, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), on a quest to find this mythical talisman.
Largely eschewing the more realistic 3D animation style of the Shrek films, The Last Wish opts for a painterly, storybook look that suits its mock-fairytale narrative. Crawford’s film bears the traces of its lengthy production history, during which Guillermo del Toro and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse co-director Bob Persichetti were both attached to direct. The Last Wish’s action sequences employ the herky-jerky wham-bam-pow comic-book style of Spider-Verse, while some of its character designs, such as the grotesquely ill-proportioned villain “Big” Jack Horner (John Mulaney) and a crimson-eyed lupine bounty hunter who looks like a cross between The Seventh Seal’s Death and the Space Coyote from Homer Simpson’s chili-induced hallucination, bear the apparent influence of del Toro’s imagination.
The film happily metabolizes a wide range of inspirations, everything from the devil-may-care adventure films of Errol Flynn to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns to Apocalypse Now. While there may be nothing particularly new in any of The Last Wish’s reference points and parodies, the Looney Tunes-like joy with which they’re delivered is nevertheless infectious.
With its multiple antagonists, constant scene hopping, and rapid-fire action set pieces, The Last Wish is certainly busy. An attempt to wring pathos out of a subplot involving Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the Three Bears (Ray Winstone, Olivia Colman, and Samson Kayo) in which they’re imagined as a cockney crime family feels particularly strained. But there’s so many witty throwaway gags, so much texture and detail in the film’s visual palette, and such exuberance in the performances—Banderas in particular seems to be having a blast tweaking his brooding lothario persona—it’s hard to care too much. And given that big-studio children’s animation so often feels like it was created by algorithm, it’s refreshing to see a kid’s cartoon like The Last Wish that’s filled with too many ideas rather than too few.
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