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Puss In Boots: The Last Wish Review
As the sixth movie in the Shrek franchise, and a sequel to 2011's slightly forgotten Puss In Boots, expectations for Puss In Boots: The Last Wish weren't exactly high. So to everyone's surprise, including mine, the movie itself has turned out to be a witty, heartfelt, action-packed and gorgeously animated adventure. It's instantly one of my favourite animated movies, and I was genuinely bowled over by the ingenuity and energy of its animation style, a blend of 3D and hand-drawn 2D that is a marked departure from the rest of the franchise.
As recognised by many people, it is a style that was popularised by another brilliant animated movie...
Influence from Into the Spider-Verse
2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse felt like a milestone for mainstream animation. It delivered a familiarly structured superhero origin story, but pulled it off with a perfect blend of heart, comedy and gorgeous visuals. Its animation blends a 2D hand-drawn style with 3D, but also has added details like comic book panels, distorted outlines to mimic the ink of a printed comic, different art styles such as manga, and dozens and dozens of small details to delight viewers watching multiple times.
It felt completely fresh and new, setting itself apart from the more uniform, predictable Disney style. It's easy to see how its commercial and critical success opened the door for Dreamworks to take a chance on Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and allow the filmmakers to experiment with a new style. Even the energy and pace of the film's comedy feels directly drawn from Spider-Verse, and other Lord and Miller features (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the directors of The Lego Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 22 Jump Street). Not every animated movie should mimic this style, but it would be incredible if it allowed budding filmmakers to break free of traditional art styles and try something completely different.
Other Animation Studios...
It's not just Into the Spider-Verse (and its upcoming sequel) that is forging the way for unique, exciting animation. There are so many recent animated movies, both aimed at children and adults, with unique art styles and strong storytelling.
Stop motion animation continues to astound, with Laika Studios being a frontrunner in the medium. They're known best for Coraline but more recently their film Kubo and the Two Strings was a standout of 2016. Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio and Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs also showcase the beauty of stop motion animation in a more 'prestige' sphere. Guillermo Del Toro's passion for animation during this year's awards circuit has been incredible and I hope more people heed his words: "Animation is a medium, not a genre." It's something that Disney would do well to listen to (more on that later...).
Smaller studios have been quietly producing beautiful work. For example, Cartoon Saloon is an Irish studio that has created a few gorgeously animated Irish-folklore inspired movies with Song of the Sea, The Secret of Kells and Wolfwalkers, as well as a more adult-oriented, powerful story about the Taliban rule in Afghanistan in 2017's The Breadwinner.
Even movies by larger studios sometimes experiment with art styles. One that comes to mind is Dreamworks' The Bad Guys which has a 2D/3D blend of styles (the characters have 'hand drawn' eyes, for example) and some creative, kinetic animation. Netflix's The Mitchells vs Machines flew under the radar for many, but also used this style in a bold, sometimes maximalist way. The Lego Movie from Warner Brothers Animation could have been a mindless cash grab, but pioneered a faux-stop motion aesthetic that completely set it apart (down to the details of scuff marks on individual Lego pieces).
You can read more about my favourite animated movies here.
International animation is also very impressive. I may not be as familiar with anime, but one has only to look at films like Your Name to recognise how gorgeously animated they are. And that's not even touching on the embarrassment of riches available on television, from Netflix's astounding Arcane, to Amazon Prime's Invincible and The Legend of Vox Machina, and Disney+'s Star Wars: Visions. Arcane in particular is one of the best animated stories of recent years, with a painterly, imaginative style reminiscent of concept art.
That’s not to say that all studios outside of Disney are fundamentally more interesting than they are. One has only to look at Illumination’s stream of well-marketed but shallow work (Sing, Minions) or *shudders* The Emoji Movie to understand how many generic, gimmicky children's movies there are. But, the point is that there is so much more variety to their work compared to the standard Disney's house style...
Disney Animation and the Curse of Live Action Adaptations
Disney was the original pioneer of animation. For years, their movies were consisently the pinnacle of animated storytelling and even now, their films (including Pixar, which falls under their umbrella) are the frontrunners in each year's awards races. In the Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars, Walt Disney Animation Studios has won four times, Pixar a whopping eleven. Every other studio *combined* has won just three. But, does Disney always deserve the win?
I'll preface this by saying that modern Disney animated films are gorgeous and often times heartfelt, funny and creative. Moana is one of the best animated films ever made, Zootopia was delightful and Tangled is one of my favourites. And Pixar's Inside Out, Coco, Luca and Soul reminds us why they have a reputation for excellence, balancing thoughtful messages with stunning animation. In fact, Pixar's 2012 short Paperman is one of the first shorts I remembering seeing that blended 2D and 3D animation seamlessly.
But, the company have also acquired a 'sameness' that permeates through both studio's efforts. Photorealism is massively impressive, but it doesn't always gel with trademark character designs like the 'Elsa eyes' that every female character now has (unforgivable in Raya and the Last Dragon!) or how human characters never really feel that different from one another. It means its hard to ever get a pure dud - every Disney film is, at the very least, stunning to look at. However, it feels increasingly unlikely that the studio will create a milestone creation like Into the Spider-Verse if they don't ever take bold, creative risks.
Then there's the push for more and more sequels even within Pixar, which first made its name because of its originality. For every Luca, Turning Red and Soul, there’s two middling efforts like Toy Story 4, Onward, Lightyear which are technically gorgeous but creatively bereft of much innovation. Lightyear in particular I found to be an utterly hollow, forgettable experience with a focus on photorealism, but absolutely no impactful images whatsoever.
That's not to say sequels are an inherently bad thing. As mentioned, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish is the sixth in the Shrek franchise, and Into the Spider-Verse is based on a well-loved IP. It's just that Disney's manner of elevating their more commercial projects (i.e. sequels) at the expense of their originals (Turning Red, Luca, and Strange World) does them no justice and hardly encourages original storytelling. It's even frustrated the creators themselves. Even when other studios are commercial e.g. with sequels and spin offs and tie ins, there’s more willingness to experiment. The Lego Movie was infamously snubbed at the Oscars perhaps because it feels gimmicky at first glance, but the quality of animation was glorious. Netflix’ animation studio may have suffered cut backs, but Klaus and The Sea Beast match many of Disney’s mid-tier efforts easily.
Disney's slew of live-action adaptations are a whole other can of worms entirely that is perhaps a bit much to get into (read: rant about) here, but their continuing push to make objectively worse live-action adaptations of all their stories only serves to undercut the power and validity of animation as a medium (it comes back to GDT's quote). Animation should be valued as a medium and not as a stepping stone for live-action. Even Dreamworks have opened the gate for this, having recently announced a live-action How to Train Your Dragon movie.
Now, I realise that Disney will never go back to producing 2D hand-drawn movies - the box office failure of The Princess and the Frog was a crossroads for them in that regard. They're still a box office titan and an awards-race favourite. However, the popularity and critical success of Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, a movie that could easily have been a cash grab, has made me wonder whether they're going to start falling behind as the lead innovators of animated movies, unless they are willing to push the boat out a bit more.
Currently, I have high hopes for Pixar's upcoming movie Elemental which looks like a cool, original idea. I am more reserved about the recently announced sequels for Toy Story, Frozen and Zootopia. They will likely be enjoyable, but I just wish they had the potential to do something completely unexpected and brilliant. And it's that feeling of being completely surprised, a feeling that Arcane and Into the Spider-Verse and Puss in Boots elicited, that I think Disney and Pixar have been missing for me recently.
Thanks for reading this article- what did you think of Puss In Boots: The Last Wish? And are you as excited as me for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse?
I do not own any of the images used in this post.