Put Your Phone Down for Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2023)
Directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado
Starring Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Harvey Guillén and much more!
Over the last few years, my theater ritual has included getting the middle seat in the back row. It started as way to limit my exposure to people coughing behind me but turned out to provide an interesting vantage point for gaining new perspective on the American theatre going experience.
For example, overall, theatergoers are courteous. Some even laugh when I recite the “heartbreak feels good in a place like this” line with Nicole Kidman during her heartfelt AMC opening monologue about the magic of cinema. On a darker note, my lofted perch has made it clear that most theatregoers ignore Kidman’s request to turn their phones off. Many leave their cell phones on bright throughout the trailers and, yes… some even leave them on during the feature film. This distraction is less frequent during arthouse and indie films, mostly due to the age of the patrons and the fact that the theatres are mostly empty.
My perspective changed again while watching my second film of 2023, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. The midweek showing of the newest Dreamworks Animation (Shrek, How to Train your Dragon, Trolls) feature was full of kids, teenagers and twenty somethings sitting in front of me, all of them with their phones on, distracting and bright. The monolithic device in their hands was more important than the film they’d just paid to see.
My irritation grew and I started to contemplate if I would ask these ungratefully distracted members of younger generations to turn off their small screens, but then something happened. On the bigger screen appeared a story told in such a frantic, colorful, humorous and engaging way that most of them tucked their phones away the time the opening scene set the stage for our fearless hero.
Puss in Boots was introduced in Shrek 2 (2004) voiced by Antonio Banderas and modeled after the actor’s performance as Zoro in The Mask of Zorro (1998). The character was popular enough to get the first and only spin-off of the Shrek franchise with 2011’s Puss in Boots. I haven’t seen this initial film in the franchise, but it looks like Salma Hayek voiced a new character named Kitty Softpaws. This character returns in this sequel and, along with Banderas’ character and newcomer Harvey Guillén as the dog, these three actors form a perfect trio of adventurers. Joining them are a slew of talented actors lending their voices to a menagerie of nursery rhyme and fairytale characters, all perfectly cast and utilized – especially John Mulaney’s irredeemable Jack Horner.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) seemed to break the animation mold, allowing adventurous new styles of animation to exist within the same narrative story. Drawing influences from Pop Art, Comic Books, anime and video game aesthetics it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. This was a watershed moment for animated films because most of the past winners were either emotionally based stories with traditional animation or Pixar-style computer renderings (Coco, Inside Out and Frozen). The new style introduced by Spiderverse has spawned not only this latest Dreamworks feature but their previous as well, the enjoyable The Bad Guys (2022).
This exciting new era in feature length animation is what I believe has convinced the younger generation to put down their devices and focus on the fast-edited, ever-changing animated stylings of a film like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Putting down the phone is one thing, but leaving it down can, I believe, be chalked up to an excellent story with emotional weight that examines legacy, friendship and even death.
Seeing this effervescent journey to the land of fairytales is more than worth seeing in a theater, yes even for the TikTok generation and their little screens. If Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Bad Guys were an A+ & B respectively then this latest film that features our fearless feline is an A-.
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