This story about “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
DreamWorks Animation’s “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is, ostensibly, part of the “Shrek” universe. It’s a sequel to 2011’s “Puss in Boots,” which itself was a spin-off of a character who was first introduced in “Shrek 2” and subsequently appeared in “Shrek the Third” and “Shrek Forever After.” And as such, there’s a certain vibe you expect from the film.
But the movie handily discards that expectation early on, when Puss (voiced once again by Antonio Banderas) finds himself in a bar. He’s just learned that of his nine lives, he’s used all but one, and so he’s facing down his own mortality. The mood is desperate, funereal. And then a giant evil wolf (Wagner Moura), a bounty hunter later revealed to be the personification of Death, walks in the door.
“That’s a huge tonal shift, not only within the movie but from the whole Shrek world and even the first Puss in Boots,” director Joel Crawford said. “As we were working on it, we were going, ‘We’re not believing the stakes of this movie and Puss isn’t believing this moment. It needs to snap him out of his arrogance.’”
Crawford points to the fact that the entire opening of the movie, which involves Puss singing a song called “Fearless Hero” and fighting a giant ogre, is seamlessly choreographed. “Even when he dies, there’s comedy going throughout the doctor’s office, where Puss is oblivious (as the doctor explains he’s on his last life),” Crawford said. “He has this immortal point of view.”
When they got to the bar scene, Crawford and his co-director Januel Mercado wanted Puss “to feel fear for the first time.” They also wanted the reaction of the character and the audience to harmonize. “The audience is like, ‘I didn’t know this could happen in this movie.’ And Puss is like, ‘I didn’t know this could happen in my life.’ That was a discovery but a welcome one that weighted the whole story. To have a joyful message, in order to feel the light you’ve got to go to the dark.”
That mixture of tones and styles extended to the art and animation of the sequence. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish employs what Crawford refers to as a “fairy tale painting look” that allowed for more visual expression. When Puss is cut by one of the wolf’s blades, it’s a startling moment, made even more so by the art direction of the sequence. “The production designer Nate Wragg did a wonderful thing in the shot when Puss is getting cut,” he said. “The whole background goes red. It’s impressionistic and stylized and then in the very next shot there’s no red but that little drop of blood. It has this emotional impact. And being able to tell a story that is impressionistic over literal makes it more universal.”
Even the characters themselves are animated differently in the sequence: The wolf is animated on ones, meaning that for every second of animation there are 24 new images; Puss, on the other hand is on twos, meaning there are only 12 images per second. “The opening is all fantastical and then when you get to this bar fight, Puss is on the back foot,” Crawford said. “Puss tries to make things fantastical with that stepped animation (on twos) but the wolf brings him back to reality with the animation on ones.”
Read more from the Awards Preview issue here.
