Link to the audio version of this post is HERE
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the very first Shrek film, putting the vaguely Scottish green ogre and his talking donkey friend Donkey seemingly permanently into our pop culture. Lego is even releasing a set to commemorate this momentous occasion, but instead of diving into a movie that, if you either were a kid or had a kid (or, like me, watched I Am Legend) in the last 25 years, you’ve probably seen or had quoted to you the first Shrek ad nauseam for two and a half decades. No, instead I want to talk about the best movie in the Shrek franchise, one that hasn’t been around nearly as long.
It’s confession time. I neither was a kid nor had a kid in the last 25 years (I was a teenager), so I watched Shrek for the first time just a few years ago as an adult. This was a bad idea. I should have just continued enjoying the “I like that boulder” clip when it was played on my local radio morning show. There’s nothing really wrong with the movies, but approaching them as an adult with no nostalgia for the films built up from a childhood watching them or watching through the eyes of a child, the humor was kind of gross (which is fine, kids love that), the references were incredibly dated at this point (are people still talking about The Matrix?), and I hated “All Star” by Smash Mouth the first time I heard in 1999. So by the time Shrek came out in 2001, I was already beyond sick of it. Well, the years start coming and they don’t stop coming; fast forward over 20 years from then, my affection for the song has done everything but grow. I cannot stand its ear-bleeding infectiousness and inescapable ubiquity. Shrek didn’t hold up for me; it didn’t feel like a movie written to be evergreen. Not Shrek 2, not Shrek 4, not Shrek, and not even Puss in Boots, the reason I saw Shrek 2 in the first place and why I saw the others in that order. I still haven’t seen Shrek the Third, but I’m not sure that’s the one that’ll turn me around on the franchise with its 41% RT score. But when Antonio Banderas returned in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish in 2022, as skeptical as I was, I sat down to watch it and it blew me away. Pull up the cardboard box your cat bed came in and start making biscuits. Let’s get into it.
At a celebration in his honor, Puss in Boots is really living it up. He sings songs about how fearless he is, people heap praise on him, but it turns out they’re partying in the governor’s mansion. Without permission. And when he interrupts it in the middle of the festivities, there’s an even further interruption in the form of a giant who attacks. As Boots defeats the governor’s men, boasting that he laughs in the face of death and that no blade has ever touched him, he faces down with the giant with aplomb. He fights heroically and vanquishes his foes with some effort. However, unfortunately, in his triumphant moment, he dies. It’s a rough go and, to be fair, not a lot of franchises have the guts to kill their titular character in the first act of the second movie. Can you imagine if in the second Fifty Shades of Grey movie, Annalise Fifty died in a car accident after being choked to completion? I’ve never seen those movies, but I assume that doesn’t happen. But this is Puss in Boots. Puss in Boots laughs in the face of death, remember?
If I had nine lives, I’d probably have a chuckle myself, so when he wakes up in a doctor’s office and he reminds Boots that death comes for us all, Boots is understandably perturbed. I mean, keep it light, Doc. It’s a PG movie. Boots has died eight times, though; he’s down to his last guy. When drowning his sorrows alone with some frosty milk in a quiet bar, a whistle cuts through the night air. The Whistling Wolf sits next to him and is very friendly at first, despite his menacing appearance.
Inevitably, violence breaks out. The Whistling Stranger (Wagner Moura, aka Pablo Escobar in Narcos) wants Boots’s bounty and a fight ensues. This is where I want to stop and talk about the animation because this is one of the things that makes this movie so breathtaking. It’s right in the middle of the sort of modern animation trifecta we’ve seen recently where the movies are incredibly visually inventive. I’m no animation expert, but it seems like this new era was ushered in by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which was unlike anything I’d ever seen before in the way that it told its story by using different animation styles. The animation wasn’t just a look, it was diegetic, it was part of the storytelling. Then recently we had the same sort of thing in the now-global phenomenon and fast food meal KPop Demon Hunters. All due respect to The Bad Guys, another very good animated kids’ movie that engages in this mix of styles, it’s The Last Wish that bridges those two aforementioned films for me. This is DreamWorks doing their best to go toe-to-toe with the leaders of modern animation, Sony, and they do an excellent job making this movie look and feel unique and not just like it’s copying Spider-Verse. It learned from it, of course, but it’s doing its own thing. The animation here is absolutely beautiful, taking influences from anime for the frenetic fight sequences and changing the animation style for different characters, even within the same scene. There will be times where the Whistling Stranger looks like he’s from another movie altogether, which emphasizes what Boots is facing in the moment. Here is an otherworldly foe who has cornered him in his most vulnerable moment, and, what’s more, he’s good. He’s really good. He’s better than Boots.
For the first time, a blade touches Puss in Boots. Wolfie here draws blood and knowing that he can’t just shrug this one off if the unthinkable happens; if Puss in Boots actually were to fall, there’d be no getting back up. What a horrible thing to only have one life to live, isn’t it? The hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The fur, I guess. And elsewhere, too. He’s a cat, he’s covered in fur, it’s going to stand up. His pulse quickens. The only sound that fills his ears is his heart pounding in his chest. And the whistling. The incessant, threatening whistling. For the first time in all his lives, Boots feels fear. In an act of incredible human reality, the once boastful, once brash, once brazen cat does something very much unlike him. He does what any sane person would do in that moment. He flees. He has a panic attack. For the first time in his life, he goes into fight or flight and chooses flight. He goes to a cat sanctuary and sheds the boots that make his name. More than that, the whole outfit goes into a grave and he gives himself a eulogy. Death may not have claimed him, but there is a funeral after all. As Dr. Hiriluk once said, “When does a man die?” Boots may be a cat and alive and well, but Puss in Boots died before the last mound of dirt fell on his grave. All that’s left is a cat-shaped husk who lives in anonymity, sharing a trough and litter box with dozens of other cats. And one small dog.
There’s a legend in fairy tale land about a shooting star that fell to Earth and created a magical forest around it, a sort of pocket dimension called the Dark Forest. It’s said that if you get to the star you will be granted a single wish. So when Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears (Ray Winstone, Olivia Colman, Samson Kayo) show up to the cat sanctuary doing their best bull in a China shop impression and let it slip that they wanted Boots’s help stealing a map to the Wishing Star from Little Jack Horner (John Mulaney), Boots can’t help but figure that he can steal it for himself and use the wish to get his nine lives back. Not a bad plan. Along with him is that one small dog, Perrito (Harvey Guillén), and, boy it pains me to say this about a cartoon cat, his former lover Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault). But all through this adventure, the whistling specter of finality follows behind, always nipping at the backs of his paws.
So by now, you and I and probably any other adult has realized what Boots and most kids probably haven’t, but the Whistling Stranger is no mere bounty hunter. Carrying two handheld sickles, cloaked in black, with arcane knowledge, this big bad wolf isn’t the Big Bad Wolf. He’s Death. Capital D Death. He’s the Green Knight and Boots is Sir Gawain. And now we’re grazing the surface of why this movie is so brilliant. It’s actually about something.
A lot of people have compared this movie to Logan, and while I see the similarities in vibe, I mention the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because, I’m almost certain coincidentally, The Last Wish came out just one year after David Lowery’s The Green Knight, which was also excellent. Now, I know the production time in animation is very, very long so it’s not like one movie inspired the other, but I was struck by the similarities in theming. They were so similar, it made me want to sit down and ask if the writers intended to adapt Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with this movie. And that makes sense to me; there’s a reason 700 years later, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is still a relevant story. Because we, as human beings, still die. And it’s still something that’s in the back of our minds, especially as we get older. It’s one of the reasons, in addition to it being Shrek’s 25th anniversary, that it’s been in my thoughts. I had a milestone birthday recently, so now I’m the oldest I’ve ever been (which is kind of always true, because that’s how time works, but you get what I’m saying). Living through the global fear of the COVID pandemic and perhaps still in its shadow in some ways, getting older; death comes to mind a lot. There are multiple multi-billion dollar industries designed around combatting aging or at least the signs of aging, so I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this. When the opportunity arose to revisit this brilliant film, I had to take it, because I’ve been itching to share my thoughts on this movie with you all for a while.
Boots and his companions take on the classic hero’s quest, just like Sir Gawain. Everything they experience is right out of classical mythology, right down to the journey to the underworld; in this case, in the form of the magically malleable Dark Forest in which the path to the star is determined by the character of the person holding the map. He has to face his past lives. And then he has to confront his own mortality; both conceptually and the personification of Death itself. He has to fight Death, a wonderfully poetic and futile battle that we all fight.
Death cannot be defeated. But we must fight against it. Not to become some immortal legend, not for glory, but because all life is precious. Death is supposed to wait until it’s “your time”, whatever that means, but here, Death wants Boots because through eight lives and eight deaths, Boots didn’t appreciate any of them. Death isn’t holding a grudge because he was laughed at, he’s holding a grudge because life has value and Boots hasn’t valued any of his. It’s not just Puss in Boots’s arrogance that bothers him, it’s the cavalier attitude with which he throws away his lives. The time here is short and with whatever time we get, it’s up to us to make that time count. To fill it with family and friends, to speak up for those who need it, to make some little difference for the better in the world while we’re still here. I’m reminded what Isaac Asimov said in The Relativity of Wrong; “There’s no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference. But how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort.” And Boots has to come to this realization for himself. The Last Wish is about Puss in Boots coming to terms with his own mortality and making peace with it. As he faces down the ultimate enemy, Boots has to know and accept that he cannot win. It is desperate, it is visceral, and it is one of the most human things I have ever seen on screen. With each lunge and each slash, with each parry and each riposte, Boots fights more and more valiantly against inevitable defeat. “I know I can never defeat you, Lobo, but I will never stop fighting for this life,” he says. Like Gawain, Boots eventually stands tall. But it’s not that he’s fearless once more, no; for the first time in his life, he’s being brave. Because bravery is continuing on in the face of fear, not the absence of it.
I hope when my time comes that I don’t greet Death like an old friend, but like Puss in Boots; with sword drawn and something still to fight for.
There’s so much in this movie. I could write this length again on its focus on found family, support structures, and appreciating the things and people that are right in front of you instead of spending your time and effort on wishing for something else. I could talk about how the movie puts emphasis on finding your own strength by putting your trust in others. But suffice it to say that I absolutely love this movie. Yes, it’s a bit violent for something made for kids; in addition to the fast paced, anime-style action sequences, The Last Wish has quite a significant body count, so do with that information what you will if you’re a parent. It’s incredible to me that a movie this good came from a franchise as silly as Shrek, and despite not liking any of the ones I’ve seen, I’m incredibly grateful that they gave way to this film. 25 years of Smash Mouth was worth it for this movie. Movies like this are why I’m so hard on movies like Minecraft and Mario. Because it’s not enough to say that a movie is for kids and then shrug off how bad it is because it’s sufficiently brightly colored and filled with references. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish may be called a kids’ movie, but this one is for everyone. It’s rated PG, 1 hour and 42 minutes long, streams on Peacock, and boasts a 95% RT score and 94% audience score. Do yourself a favor and watch this one. And then when that’s done, take a breath if you need it (I know I did), and watch the excellent video that Cinema Therapy did on it. I’ve only scratched the surface here and they go quite deep into the psychology of it. Definitely worth a watch, just like The Last Wish itself.
