Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Joel Crawford, Januel Mercado, 2023) In a recent podcast I was participating in, one of the other folks mentioned that she'd seen Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. "Trust me," she said "You'll want to see this." I remember being a bit skeptical, but made a note that I should see it at an early opportunity.

I didn't—although even at this late date (it having been released to streaming and on DVD, Blu-Ray and 4K) it is still possible. And I regretted it, after I watched it. It is good. It's hilarious in places, even.

But, I didn't know—until I started pulling screen-shots for this post—that what Dreamworks Animation, and directors Joel Crawford, Mercado and crew were doing with this film was something quite extraordinary. I doubt most people will notice it (or even care) and instead concentrate on the laughs and entertainment value, which is indeed considerable. But, what I noticed is a bit revolutionary while simultaneously not. I'll explain after a plot summary.

Puss (voiced, again, delightfully, by Antonio Banderas) is in the city of Del Mar being feted by the townspeople, when the song and dance and ego are interrupted by the presence of a large giant who starts menacing the town. Utilizing one of the musicians' bass strings, the "Stabby Tabby" launches himself at the creature and proceeds to do battle with it in a proximity that the thing just can't handle. Ultimately, Puss escapes death a dozen times and dispatches the horrid beast...only to be crushed by a large brass bell that the cat (who might have resented being belled in the past) used to subdue it.

(Well, that was a short movie, kids!)

 

But, no, Puss wakes up in a doctor's office, a little shaken but defying the cartoon-logic that he's a flat as a pancake or has a bell-shaped divot in his body. Although he has trouble remembering, the doc asks how many of his traditional nine lives Puss has gone through. A quick montage of Puss dying in stupid and Darwin Award qualifying ways...eight times. It seems Puss is living his last life now, and the doctor advises he give up...well, everything he's doing...and go retire with an old cat lady and attempt to die of old age.

He decides against that until he sits in a kitty-bar—lapping milk, of course—when a tall, dark stranger appears sitting next to him. It's a bounty hunter, Lobo (Wagner Moura) and as wolves go, he's a "Big Bad" right down to the hairs on his chinny-chin-chin, dressed much like The Grim Reaper—right down to the scythe accessories he sports. He's a bounty hunter, but a particularly chatty one, full of complimentary talk about reputations and that sort of thing, but it's merely trash-talk as he's come for a fight and—being a representative of Death—knows he has to win eventually.

It's a lovely little conceit, but then the "Puss" and "Shrek" series have always been the most fun skewering fairy-tales and casting their tropes in different lights. The Big Bad Wolf, mainstay as he is in fairy-tales, of course, could be seen as some sort of opportunistic stalker, if you want to put it in an anthropomorphic, modern context, and here he's such a presence that he makes a fine foil for the Cat's foil, and intimidating enough that Puss does, indeed, retire to a cat-lady's house, where the sight of a litter-box makes him gag. "So...this is where dignity goes to die."

The plot involves Puss, a chihuahua-in-cat's-clothing named Garrito (Harvey Guillén)—who was stowing away at the cat-lady's— as well as Puss former fiancee, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), who are hired by soldiers-of-fortune Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and The Three Bears Crime Family (Ray Winstone, Olivia Colman, and Samson Kayo, all delightful!) to steal the legendary Wishing Star for that talisman-collecting Baker-turned-Crime Boss "Big" Jack Horner (Imagine John Mulaney saying "Well, You know what they say—Can't bake a pie without losing a dozen men!" Yeah. He's hilarious.), even with the constant threat of Lobo/Death ("Why the hell did I play with my food?") lurking nearby.

It is, quite frequently, laugh-out-loud funny (especially if you co-habit with a cat*), not only because the material is inspired but the voice-actors are hilarious doing it. Pugh, Colman, Winstone, and Kayo all play their parts like they've just come over from "Eastenders" and their quick-bickering banter is fast and a little furious—they're all about "family." If your family is "The Sopranos."

Now, what's special about this here Puss in Boots flick is the art. Dreamworks Animation has always been a little bit behind the curve when it comes to their CGI animated features—remember the play-dohish Shrek?—pushing towards verisimilitude and life-like imagery, long after Pixar gave it up starting with Geri's Game in 1997. Now, after the envelope-pushing example of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (which made an example of "playing it rough") they're giving it up.

Blow up any of the images on this page, and you'll see less attention to detail, and more to "the feel" of the thing. Just as realism and romanticism gave way to neo-realism and impressionism, the new crop of animators have discovered that you can do more with less. Here, the images are smeared, like paintings...or the way the old matte artists used to crate camera-realistic landscapes from just "blobs" of paint. Disney went through a "rough" phase of animation in the 1950's, but that was usually due to budgetary reasons. But, this is deliberate. And it is beautiful.

One wondered why Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was on the short-list of animated feature Oscars this year, but all questions are pushed aside after seeing the work. The best way to end this post is to post a few more images with the advice that one should skip the home-viewing and side this on the big, big screen.

* Mine (who is nameless), who loves a good Nature program about lions on the Serengeti, scornfully ignored this one, turned her back and went to sleep with a dismissive  scowl on her own puss.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

The Ultimate Spectacular Amazing Spider-Man
or
"Aw, Did That Feel Like a Cartoon?"

Back in "the day", before the super-hero glut in multi-plexes, James Cameron was trying to untangle the web-like rights to the Spider-Man character to make the first Spider-Man movie. Rumors were that it was going to be prohibitively expensive as well, as Cameron's story involved multiple dimensions—that was a rumor, but in those pre-Titanic days, everything associated with Cameron was considered prohibitively expensive, despite the fact that he could squeeze every last drop of screen quality out of his budgets just by clever movie-making legerdemain. It also seemed like a big leap in concept for that first introductory "Spidey" movie—audiences needed to be able to "buy" into things like radioactive spiders, web-shooters, urban web-slinging, sticking to walls, and fooling your old "biddy" aunt that you were at the library when you came home bruised after fighting a giant lizard before we got into any story with any real dimension—or many of them. With great powers comes great amounts of time justifying them to an audience that still doesn't quite believe a man can fly.

But, if you're going to crank out comics monthly (or bi-weekly), you have to come up with something besides a story about a villain that dresses up like an aardvark for the hero to fight, so writers—being writers—came up with the "multiple earths" theory where you could have stories with a "what if?" hook. DC started it with their "Flash of Two Worlds" story in a 1961 issue of The Flash comic book, where that book's hero visited the alternate Earth of "The Flash" from the 1940's—although Wikipedia makes a case for it starting in a 1953 issue of "Wonder Woman." Marvel started their multiple Universes with 1984's "Captain Britain" series, but, recently, the various media in which superheroes appear have dabbled with "Alternate Earth" story-lines, the most recent (and I'd argue at first viewing) and among the best of any super-hero films is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with a story written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman and energetically directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and and Rothman.

Meet Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), a high school student living in New York. Dad (Bryan Tyree Henry) is with the NYPD, and his Mom (Luna Lauren Velez) is a nurse. He attends Brooklyn Visions Academy, a charter school, although he'd rather be at Brooklyn Middle with his pals. It's just Miles is brilliant—he can't even fail a test to get kicked out. Miles is more of an artist than academic, and despite the pressure from his folks, he'd rather be spending time with his Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), although his father disapproves.

His Dad also disapproves of Spider-Man (voiced by Chris Pine), who starts out the movie with a "Okay, let's do this again" narration that introduces you to who Spider-Man is—he will remind you a lot of previous "Spider-Men" in other Spider-Man movies, at least THIS Universe's Spider-Man movies—talking himself up and ending with "The only thing standing between this city and oblivion is the one and only Spider-Man."

A bit premature, that. After another spat with Dad about having to go to BVU, Miles goes to visit his Uncle Aaron, who encourages his graffiti-art and takes him to the subway, where Miles gets to practice painting the wall of a blocked-off section. It is here where Miles gets bitten by a radioactive spider, because, hey, it's happened before, and he finds that things get a bit sticky and has him climbing the walls...quite literally. That's something that doesn't happen with puberty, and it causes all sorts of mishaps that he can't explain and does not understand.

Standard stuff, right? At least standard for a Spider-Man movie. But, this is where things get good. Very good. Because with great powers come some great graphics and some very imaginative film-making. The directors go full-tilt comic book with narrative boxes, emoti-squiggles, dramatic freeze-frames, and some onomatopoetic effects that seamlessly interact with the action going on, and become a part of the landscape of its hero's experiences. At times, it is positively thrilling to watch Spider-Verse unfold, so creative are the choices to enhance it made, without sacrificing the momentum of the film or the story. Nobody's tried this since Ang Lee made his Hulk movie, but this is far more successful in every way.

At the same time, look at the picture of Miles looking at the spider that irradiated him. Click on it. Look at it large and look at the light. It's made of dots, not unlike how the old comic-books used to make graded colors out of the primaries. It's subtle, but noticeable and they do that throughout the movie, creating an image that isn't pure white light, but has an ethereal glow to it. It's done quite a bit in the movie, but never to the point where it's really distracting, but gives it "an edge" being in a movie, although it elicited a nostalgic sense of memory for this old comics reader.

One more technical thing which I loved (then I promise I'll get back to the movie): the three directors do a wonderful thing with focus and distance—they take it slightly off-focus, by merely shifting color gradients a bit, like an old-time comics printing error, while they keep the area of intended attention sharp. This was particularly effective in 3-D (which, for once, I recommend) where it looks a bit like the stereoscopic errors that plagued the close perspective images in the early versions of the latest generation of three dimension-pushing films. This is a great choice and one more cleverly innovative way the directors create their comic-book world. By comparison, look at the difference between the shot above, and their photo-realistic city-scape below.

End of technical geek-out—

While strolling up the side of a building, he's noticed by Spider-Man—the established Spider-Man—who takes Miles under his web to learn the...webs. Unfortunately, on that night, Wilson Fisk—the New York gangster called "The Kingpin" (voiced by Liev Schreiber) is testing a new device that creates a trans-dimensional bridge because...well, that's a spoiler that's revealed in a lovely sequence based on the art-style of Bill Senkiewicz...but Fish doesn't care that it causes city-wide earthquakes and a "glitching" transformation of pieces of New York. He's a big, bad dude, after all, and he proves it by killing Spider-Man when he tries to stop the destruction.

New York mourns Peter Parker, the twenty-something who was Spider-Man, except that...he's blond! The Peter Parker "we" know has dark hair and we have that verified when he shows up on Miles' Earth, having been sucked out of his world due to Fisk's foolhardy experiments. THIS Parker—Peter B. Parker (voiced by Jake Johnson)—is also 20-something, not in the best of shape (Miles calls him the "brink old-joke hobo Spider-Man") and is going through an emotional upheaval after the collapse of his marriage to Mary Jane Watson (Zoë Kravitz). Despite that, he's the only "one-and-only" Spider-Man in town, and Miles looks to him to help him become the Spider-Man he wants to be. As Peter B. wants to get back to his own world, he agrees, especially since Miles has a doo-hickey needed to shut off the Fisk-machine—except that...he broke it. So the two make a trip to Fisk Tech-Labs to try and find a replacement, because, as Peter B says, "the best way to learn is intense, life-threatening pressure."

They also get help from that Earth's Aunt May (voiced by Lily Tomlin, bless her) and other dimensional Spidey's who show up at her door-step—because they all have an Aunt May. There's Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) from the dimension where Gwen Stacy becomes a Spider-person, Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage) who comes from a gritty, black-and-white Universe, Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn), who, with her robot spider-kick is an anime hero, and, finally, Spider-Ham (voiced by John Mulaney), the Spidey from a cartoon universe. The six web-slingers form a team to try and get back to their own worlds...and teach Miles that "with great abilities come great accountability" (or something like that) because it takes a village of Spider-people.

Sound complicated? Not really, certainly not the way the film-makers tell it. Entertaining? That, it CERTAINLY is. Turns out it takes SIX Spider-Men to change a franchise...for the better. Given the whole package, story, direction and animation imagination, one is confident in saying Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is the best of this particular hero's films—even better than the live-action Spider-Man 2—and certainly, animation aside, the best directed of the Spider-Man films (which never really managed to convey good Spider-Man action no matter how much they tried) even given its many changes of perspectives and often vertigo-inducing sequences.

Speaking of which, while I was watching the film, some of the more (shall we say?) "flashy" effects seemed to be extreme and given the pace of the film, a might strobe-like. There was a time when I wanted to end the review by saying that the only way you could not like the film would be if you had no interest in animation, visual presentation or prone to epileptic seizures. When I went to another theater the next day, there was a warning placard at the concession stand warning of those prone to epilepsy of such effects as they were displayed. There is some internet chatter about making an online petition. Duly noted. Take note. Some dimensions you don't want to fall into.

Still, I enjoyed the flashing lights. My admiration for the film has only grown since the day I saw it, and my distance from it has not dimmed my enthusiasm or admiration for this, one of the best presentations of the superhero genre, ever.