(courtesy IMP Awards)
The really great animated films, the one that capture your heart and delight the eyes, are the ones that give you something to really connect to and which make you feel like you’ve come home.
Yes, home.
That might seem like an odd thing to say about an animated movie which, visually at least, often looks nothing like the real world; pleasing to the eye, yes, but not exactly a place to hang your hat as it were.
But if the characters are right, the journey pitched and realised just so, and there’s a sense of family and belonging and lessons learned by narrative’s end, then films like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish can feel like exactly the emotional homecoming you need.
The sequel to 2011’s Puss in Boots, a riot of fun and swashbuckling feline derring-do, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish works primarily because it sends the film’s adorably arrogant eponymous protagonist on the kind of journey that very few heroes dare to go on – right into their heart of themselves.
Pretty much any hero you can name will happily wade into battle, danger or a swamp filled with man-eating zombie alien alligators, but deep down into the murky confines of their own soul, their mortality writ large and their shortcomings struck in gaudy neon?
No, thank you very much, there’s heroic work to be done, and Puss in Boots aka Pickles (a long but funny story), voiced, as always, by Antonio Banderas, is no different, reacting to Death stalking him (it’s guise is worth the reveal, dramatically and suitably epic) with the urge to run and run hard, anywhere that his final foe is not.
We all know we can’t outrun Death but Puss in Boots gives it his best shot, although to be fair, he doesn’t know that he’s that close to shuffling off this mortal, fur-covered coil until he discovers, after an inconvenient death following some heroic work saving a village from a towering giant reveals that he’s used eight of his nine lives.
Now I think we can all agree that nine lives is a very generous allotment of years and that it would be wise, nay prudent, to use them well and keep life ticking over for as long as possible.
But Puss in Boots is, a you might recall, a tad cavalier, consumed by his own heroic press and convinced he is immortal and can outrun and out-dodge anything and everyone – he’s a hero, after all, and heroes never die.
Until, of course, they do, and he’s died eight times, in ways that, when he recall are rampantly and laugh-out-loud hilarious – the sequence where his glib dismissal of mortality gives way to sobering realisation as he recounts his various deaths is both very funny and full of pathos – and animated in a way that’s playful and yet emotionally impactful too.
Freaked out, and really that’s the only to describe the way he’s goes from swaggeringly unafraid to scared enough to give himself up to be one of the many very ordinary cats at Mama Luna’s (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), he leaves his old life behind, burying (literally!) his hat and boots and taking up litter trays and dry cat food.
The transition is not without some kinks and the scenes where Mama Luna catches him using the toilet and cooking up a hearty meal are worth the price of admission alone, but Puss in Boots eventually grows a beard, sleeps in his mittens and accepts his heroic days are gone forever.
Until, they are not, as Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the Three Bears – Mama (Olivia Colman), Papa (Ray Winstone) and baby (Samson Kayo), who are criminals but a warm and mostly loving family in their own right – come busting through in search of a magical map that will lead the lucky owner to a place where a fallen star, buried and glowing in the earth, can grant one, huge, life-changing wish.
Goldilocks wants it, you assume, for nefarious purposes – turns out the real reason is something else entirely and will break your heart and knit it back again, an example of how heartfelt Puss in Boots: The Last Wish surprisingly is – and “Big” Jack Horner (John Mulaney), a crime lord and pie maker (naturally) wants to rule the world, but Puss in Boots?
Why he just wants to deal with that pesky business of his last life being the only one he has left and the star seems a great way to keep Death, who just won’t leave him alone, well away from his daring mortal exploits.
Adopted, and really that’s the only way to put it by an eccentric but enthusiastically goodhearted chihuahua named Perrito (Harvey Guillén) who dresses up as a cat at Mama Luna’s home in a bid to escape the rats and cockroaches under the porch, and reunited with his frenemy Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault), Puss in Boots sets off a grand adventure, one that initially is his big chance to look after himself and himself only.
But a funny thing happens on the way to being all self-serving and as Puss in Boots: The Last Wish wends its wonderful way through the Dark Forest, with everyone engaged in a fearsomely theatrical battle to get to the star first, and Perrito being ridiculously, hilariously, world-changingly adorable (he’s that good and endlessly, happily optimistic) and our hero ends up having the very best of existential crises.
It’s this very meaningful twist in a story that has already beautifully brought together buoyantly anarchic humour, verbal slapstick and real heart that really makes Puss in Boots: The Last Wish so special and gives it that just-arrived-home feeling you get in any story when the main character realises that what they’ve been chasing all these years is actually not what their heart desires.
You’re laughing a lot throughout, and if nothing else, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a very funny, cleverly comedic movie that makes great use of a more artistic approach to animation spurred on by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but your heart is also fully and wholly engaged as our intrepid, once-arrogant hero discovers that maybe there are more important things in life than being a lauded hero and that maybe his wish has already been answered before he even gets anywhere near the star.
In the end, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a soul-reviving shot of reassuring, found family joy that manages to go heavy on the heartfelt messaging without sinking under the weight of all that earnestness, artfully and affectingly mixing the silly with the serious to profoundly good effect and reminding us to check what lies in our orbit before launching into the stars, or star as it were, hoping to find elusive happiness there.