Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
2022 · Joel Crawford
For family movie night when you want everyone actually invested — or for any grown-up who wants a gorgeous, funny adventure that sneaks up on the heart. Comfort viewing with unexpected depth.
What it's about
Puss in Boots discovers he's burned through eight of his nine lives, and the ninth suddenly feels very finite — especially with a whistling, red-eyed wolf on his trail who is exactly what he appears to be. Down to his last chance, Puss sets out through a shape-shifting dark forest after the mythical Last Wish, racing Goldilocks's crime-family bears and a serenely sociopathic Jack Horner to it.
The experience
A rocket-paced fairy-tale adventure that keeps its jokes flying while smuggling in real dread and real tenderness — the wolf scenes carry a chill you don't expect, and the whole thing lands with surprising emotional weight. Kids get a romp; adults get a little choked up.
Performances
Antonio Banderas gives Puss real swagger and real vulnerability — a decade-old voice role suddenly deepened into a character wrestling with mortality without ever losing the charm.
The craft
The animation breaks from studio house realism into a painterly, storybook surface that shifts gears mid-scene: action sequences drop to a stepped, lower frame rate so every sword-slash lands like a panel from an illustrated fairy tale. It's one of the best-looking mainstream animated films of its moment and absolutely rewards a big screen.
Why it matters
It marked a creative resurgence for DreamWorks and helped cement the industry-wide turn toward stylized, illustration-inspired animation over photoreal polish — proof a legacy franchise could take genuine artistic risks.
Reception & legacy: how Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was received, argued over, and remembered →
A decade after its indifferent predecessor, DreamWorks handed its swashbuckling cat to Joel Crawford and got back something nobody expected: a genuine memento mori for children. Antonio Banderas's Puss, down to his last life, must reckon for the first time with an ending — pursued by a whistling, red-eyed wolf who is exactly what he appears to be, and one of the great animated menaces of the era. The film absorbed the lesson of Spider-Verse without copying it, breaking from DreamWorks house realism into a painterly, storybook surface that shifts gears mid-scene: action sequences drop to stepped, lower-frame-rate animation so every sword-slash lands like a panel from an illustrated fairy tale. Around the edges it packs in Goldilocks's crime-family bears, a serenely sociopathic Jack Horner, and a dark forest that redraws itself according to whoever holds the map. The panic attack Puss suffers midway — held, quiet, unhurried — became one of the most discussed scenes in recent mainstream animation: a family blockbuster willing to sit still while its hero shakes.
Lines of influence
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) — Established the template Last Wish runs on — animating heroes 'on twos/threes' with stepped, reduced-frame-rate motion, ink outlines, halftone dots and chromatic-aberration edges so CG reads as a moving comic panel.
- Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) — The Big Bad Wolf is a Leone gunslinger reskinned — a whistling, unhurried Death announced by a recurring leitmotif, staged in extreme eye-line close-ups and stretched, silence-heavy standoffs before the strike.
- The Mask of Zorro (1998) — Source of Banderas's flourish-and-flirt Latin swashbuckler swordsman — the cape, the blade-carved signature, the romantic duelist swagger that Puss's whole voice performance affectionately caricatures.
- Shrek 2 (2004) — Debuts Banderas as Puss and the signature weaponized-cuteness gag — the giant wet 'please' eyes deployed mid-fight — which Last Wish escalates into a running character beat.
- The Seventh Seal (1957) — Origin of the antagonist-as-Death conceit — a personified, patient Death who engages the mortal directly and forces a reckoning with finitude, refashioned here as the Wolf stalking a cat down to his last life.
- Kung Fu Panda (2008) — DreamWorks' earlier experiment in brush-and-ink stylized interludes and posed wuxia action staging, a house precedent for departing from photoreal CG toward graphic surface.
- Klaus (2019) — Revived painterly surface in feature animation by baking hand-painted volumetric light and texture onto stylized forms — the 'illustration that moves' look Last Wish pushes into oil-paint backgrounds.
- Samurai Jack (2001) — Minimalist, graphically flattened backgrounds and held, posed action frames — the aesthetic behind the film's self-redrawing forest and its willingness to freeze on a stylized silhouette mid-duel.
- The Bad Guys (2022) — Same-studio, same-year DreamWorks sibling applying comic-panel motion lines, smear frames and a stylized villain-crew ensemble atop CG, part of the studio's coordinated post-Spider-Verse turn.
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) — Extends the stepped-animation grammar Last Wish adopted, assigning distinct frame rates and rendering styles per character within a shot — the escalation of the technique both films share.
- The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) — Lord/Miller-produced kin that layers hand-drawn 2D doodles, lens flares and painted textures over CG, part of the same production lineage legitimizing mixed-media stylization.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) — Pushes the trend further with visibly hand-sketched linework, wobbling outlines and fingerprint-smudge texture, treating the frame as a teenager's drawing the way Last Wish treats it as a storybook.
- Nimona (2023) — Adopts the stepped, graphic-novel-flat post-Spider-Verse look for a fairy-tale outsider story, inheriting the reduced-frame cadence and bold-shape staging Last Wish helped normalize.
- The Wild Robot (2024) — DreamWorks successor that carries the painterly-surface breakthrough into Impressionist brushstroke backgrounds and loose, visible paint over CG, explicitly citing the studio's 'handmade' pivot.
- Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) — Contemporaneous fairy tale that stages a frank confrontation with mortality and a personified Death, its stop-motion 'on twos' cadence rhyming with the deliberately non-fluid, hand-posed motion Last Wish chases.
- Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) — Prior pastiche that fuses Leone standoff geometry with abrupt anime-style tonal and frame-rate gear-shifts inside a fight — the same mid-scene stylistic gear-change the Wolf duels deploy.