Dec 22, 2022

-Puss in Boots The Last Wish DreamWorks-Adventurous animation is like catnip for critics

DreamWorks' "Puss in Boots": "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" opened in full this week, and critics are largely unanimous in their assessment of the latest installment in the Schreck franchise.

The film, directed by Joel Crawford and co-directed by Januel Mercado, currently has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 96% and is just behind "Turning Red" (95%), Guillermo del Toro's "Pinocchio" (97%), "Marcel Wise Shoes On" (99 %), and other 2022 animated feature films, making it elite company with the other animated features. It is no wonder that the film has already garnered awards season attention and is ultimately one of the leading contenders for an Academy Award nomination.

Among the film's strengths, which critics are most enthusiastic about, its stylish animation and offbeat action scenes seem to be the most common. However, there is plenty of praise for the all-ages humor, the fast-moving narrative, and the voice acting. There is also a unanimous consensus that, as far as we could find, the "death" version of the film is one of the best to grace the big screen in quite some time.

Critics' comments on Puss in Boots include:

The A.V. Club's Lee Monson praises the franchise's latest aesthetic upgrade:

The most obvious upgrade from the previous film is Animation, which draws inspiration from many sources but echoes the innovations pioneered in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where the combination of 2D and 3D animation blends well with the picture book aesthetic that The Last Wish aims for. Quiet scenes immerse the viewer in beautiful landscapes, which seamlessly evolve into frenetic, more shonen-inspired action. Notably, despite being from a franchise known for its reflective cynicism, Last Wish is a vibrant, moving spectacle that revels in a grab bag of fairy tale pastiche without irony, without ever rehashing familiar characters or themes.

In an Indiewire review, Emma Stefanski praised DreamWorks' common sense in trying to play with aesthetics:

DreamWorks' animation department ("The Last Wish," which premiered a brand new logo celebrating the studio's popular characters ) has long been underrated (aside from the "Boss Baby" franchise) in terms of experimenting with new styles and aesthetics with each film. In "The Last Wish," standard computer-generated imagery blends particularly delightfully with the broad look of hand-drawn animation and the fast-paced, flip-book style fight choreography that made "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" so popular.

Variety's Peter DeBruge believes that "Last Wish" will set DreamWorks up for success when it returns to "Shrek" in the future:

It is amazing how quickly computer-animated toons can begin to look old.

It is amazing how quickly computer-animated toons can start to look old. Most audiences will not notice, but the rigging of the characters has been greatly improved. Whereas in the "Shrek" films, shoulders often looked odd, this time around, both humans and animals have larger, more convincing postures. Add to that the pictorial upgrades, and the littles will pave the way for a whole new aesthetic when the studio decides to reboot "Shrek."

Inverse's Hoai-Tran Bui was particularly impressed with the film's ultra-stylish characters:

But if The Last Wish had not been so brilliantly animated, the celebrity voice cast's unexpectedly vocal Borrowing from the comic-inspired CG animation of Into the Spider-Verse, The Last Wish has a painterly look never before seen in a Shrek film. The reason for this is ...... Nothing in particular, except that it looks cool, a dynamic and visually stimulating stylistic choice that is in a league with the over-the-top personality of Puss in Boots (Puss in Boots). Little stylistic touches make "The Last Wish" all the more fantastic: lines appearing in the air when people clap, actions that move faster than the blink of an eye, lush greenery that turns bright pink in an instant, and the threat of death that turns the world a deep shadow and a burning red. Special attention is also paid to character design, with the bounty hunter Wolf, wielding a scythe, appearing every time as a phantom of death.

Keith Watson of "Slant" is similarly enthusiastic about the film's aesthetic and lavishes special praise on the character designs:

Avoiding the realistic 3D animation style of the "Shrek" films, "Last Wish" is more like a painting, a fairy tale He chose a picture-book style that suited the story. There are traces of the long production period during which Guillermo del Toro and "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" co-director Bob Persichetti were set to direct the film. The action scenes in "The Last Wish" adopt the comic book style of "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," with grotesque and disproportionate villain "Big" Jack Horner (John Mulaney) and the "death" of "The Seventh Seal" and Homer The influence of del Toro's imagination can be seen in character designs such as Lupin's bounty hunter with crimson eyes that look like a cross between the space coyote in Simpson's Chilean hallucination.