Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
2022 · Joel Crawford · Puss in Boots: The Last Wish on Sightlines
Somewhere behind him, a wolf is whistling. Puss hears it before anything comes into view, and the movie changes speed. This is a cat who has spent eight lives at a full sprint, cape snapping, his signature carved into the furniture with three strokes of a blade. The whistle is the first thing in his world that a sword cannot answer.
Deleuze's name for the cinema Puss has been living in is the movement-image, and its engine is a circuit so ordinary we stop noticing it: a character perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts to change it. Swashbucklers are the purest specimen. Deleuze would call this one a large form — an encompassing situation bears down (death is coming, and it has a name), the hero moves through it, one decisive act is supposed to turn it around. Banderas's performance, inherited from his Zorro and first sharpened for animation in Shrek 2, is the body of that circuit: flourish, flirt, strike. Puss doesn't have a psychology so much as a posture. Deleuze has a word for that too, the gest: a stance that shows you a social or theatrical role rather than an inner person. Puss's swagger is a citation. He's doing an impression of a hero, and the film knows it.
The lives are the problem. Eight gone, and the count runs one way only. That isn't the shape of an adventure, it's the shape of what Deleuze called a line of slope: the downhill run of an appetite that consumes the thing feeding it. The hunger for glory was always this character's motor. Here it's revealed to have been a fuel gauge, and there's one bar left.
Which brings us to the scene everyone talks about. Midway through, the circuit snaps. Puss perceives a threat with total clarity and cannot act on it. Heart going, breath wrong. Nothing to swing at. Deleuze's term for precisely this failure is the crisis of the action-image, and he found it in postwar Europe, in Rossellini and Antonioni, where characters stop being agents and become watchers stranded in front of situations too large to fix. What's left when action drains out is what he called a pure optical situation: an image you can only look at. The remarkable thing is not that a cartoon cat has a panic attack. It's that the film holds it. No cut to relief, no gag to bleed off the pressure, no swell of score telling you how long to feel it. A family blockbuster sits still while its hero shakes.
And it isn't a one-off. Deleuze listed the symptoms of the crisis, and this film carries several at its edges: a dispersive situation, various parties tied together by nothing stronger than wanting the same map — Goldilocks running a bear crime family, Jack Horner being serenely, casually monstrous — plus a consciousness of clichés so total it's the franchise's native air. These are fairy-tale figures who know they're furniture. Deleuze thought this condition was where cinema lost its faith in action. Last Wish feels it fully and keeps swinging anyway, which is rarer than either the cynical version or the innocent one.
Now the animation, because this is where Crawford's film makes something genuinely new.
Cinema 1 opens with a distinction older than film. Ancient art built movement out of poses: the javelin at the apex of its arc, the moment of maximum expression. Deleuze calls these privileged instants. Cinema broke with them. It slices motion into equidistant samples, twenty-four a second, none of them special — any-instant-whatevers — and movement emerges from the indifference of the sampling. That indifference is what made the medium modern, and CG animation is the principle industrialized: every in-between computed, motion perfectly continuous and therefore weightless. Call it DreamWorks house realism.
Last Wish throws frames away. On the big strikes it steps down to twos and threes, so the sword doesn't sweep, it arrives: pose, hold, pose. Ink outlines, halftone dots, colour edges that don't quite register. The surface stops pretending it isn't drawn. What that buys is the privileged instant, handed back to the one medium defined by refusing it. A held pose has weight exactly because it costs you the motion around it; you feel the frames that aren't there. Better still, the film can change gears inside a single scene — smooth while the world merely runs, stepped when something is at stake. Speed becomes a variable the movie plays rather than the air it breathes.
The vocabulary is Into the Spider-Verse's. That film invented the reduced-frame-rate hero and the comic-panel surface, and its debt here is unmistakable and unhidden. DreamWorks also had its own precedent in Kung Fu Panda's brush-and-ink interludes and posed wuxia staging. What Last Wish contributes is proof of transfer: that the look is a grammar, available to another crew on another property, not one film's signature. Someone has to be second and be good, or an invention stays a curiosity.
The Wolf is stolen from a Western and improved. Leone built standoffs out of faces: extreme eye-line close-ups, silence stretched past comfort, a leitmotif that announces the man before the man. Deleuze's account of the close-up fits Leone like a glove. The face is torn out of its coordinates until it stops belonging to a person and becomes a pure intensity, features creeping toward a threshold. That's the Wolf. Red eyes, no hurry, a whistle doing the work of an entrance. And unlike Bergman's Death in The Seventh Seal, who plays chess, argues, grants a reprieve, this one doesn't negotiate and isn't secretly something else. He is exactly what he appears to be. In a genre addicted to the reveal, refusing one is the sharper knife.
Set that against the franchise's oldest joke. Puss's giant wet 'please' eyes, deployed mid-fight, have been a gag since Shrek 2: a face held still, broadcasting one pure quality, dropped into an action scene as a tactic. It is an affection-image used as a weapon. Which means these movies have been playing for eighteen years with the gap between feeling something and doing something. Last Wish is the one that stops playing. Same device, punchline removed: a face that can't discharge into an act.
One more thing, the most elegant idea in the picture. The dark forest redraws itself according to whoever holds the map. Normally geography comes first and the hero crosses it. Here the terrain is an output of desire, which is why the chase through it is really an argument, each character walking into the landscape their own wanting generates. Deleuze's diagram: a map that keeps remaking itself over time, until space stops being a container and becomes closer to a thought.
Watch it again for the frame rate. That's the invitation. Notice when the motion steps down and what the film thinks deserves a pose. Notice how much running time it spends on a hero who cannot use the only skill he has. The open question isn't whether Puss gets his nine lives back. It's the one the counter has been asking since the first scene: whether one life you know the end of is worth more than eight you never bothered to count. A cartoon cat asks it, without a wink. That's a better question than most films manage with a straight face.
Concepts in play
- privileged-instants — Action sequences drop to stepped, lower-frame-rate animation so every sword-slash lands like a panel from an illustrated fairy tale — pose, hold, pose, the posed climactic form restored inside CG.
- any-instant-whatever — The DreamWorks house realism the film breaks from: continuous, fully in-betweened CG motion, every instant equidistant and none privileged.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The midway panic attack: Puss perceives the threat with total clarity and can no longer react adequately to it — the sensory-motor circuit of the swashbuckler snapping.
- pure optical & sound situations — The panic attack held quiet and unhurried, a family blockbuster willing to sit still while its hero shakes and no action is available to him.
- entropy / degradation — Eight of nine lives burned by a passion for adventure that has 'taken its toll' — a counter that runs only one way, toward the last life.
- action-image-large-form — The quest structure: an encompassing situation (death personified, one life left) presses until the hero's journey for the Last Wish is meant to transform it.
- icon of power — The Big Bad Wolf staged in extreme eye-line close-ups and stretched, silence-heavy standoffs before the strike, red eyes and whistled leitmotif building intensity to a threshold.
- icon of quality — The weaponized-cuteness gag inherited from Shrek 2 — the giant wet 'please' eyes, an immobile face broadcasting one pure quality, deployed mid-fight and escalated here into a running beat.
- diagram — The dark forest that redraws itself according to whoever holds the map — terrain generated by desire rather than crossed as a fixed milieu.
- dispersive-situation — Goldilocks's crime-family bears, the serenely sociopathic Jack Horner and Puss's party, loosely linked by nothing stronger than all wanting the same map.
- consciousness-of-cliches — Fairy-tale figures repurposed as crime family and heist villain, and a voice performance that affectionately caricatures the Zorro swashbuckler it descends from.
- the-gest — Puss's inherited Mask of Zorro posture — cape, blade-carved signature, romantic duelist swagger — worn as a theatrical role rather than a psychology.