Deconstructing Shrek: A Review of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”

If I were forced to sit down and guess where all of Hollywood’s talented animators had gone and tucked their heads away for the last ten years, I certainly would not have thought that they were all diligently working to produce a sequel to a pretty widely forgotten Shrek spinoff. Sitting down and watching the opening sequence to DreamWorks’ newest release, “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” I discovered that this was, in fact, where they had gone. With a warm, detailed, story-book-like aesthetic and hilarious, loud, and intricate action scenes, the animation at no point ceases to amaze, and at all times serves to support and enhance the tone of the story.

While the story itself was, objectively, nothing particularly special, in our present milieu of Marvel movies and Star Wars spinoffs, the plot was refreshingly authentic: the story was tight, the protagonist strong, the characters well-developed, the villains appropriately evil. Aside from the presence of an obnoxious supporting character (the sort of character which apparently has to be in each and every contemporary children’s movie), there’s nothing inherent in the story that really serves either to take the viewer out of the experience or to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

While DreamWorks, a company created to explicitly be on the “edgier” side of children’s movies, includes in the film plenty of body humor, a great deal of implied swearing, and themes and moments which are obviously rather dark, nevertheless Puss in Boots proves to be nowhere near as cynical as its famously cynical predecessor, Shrek—while Shrek was created for the explicit purpose of “deconstructing” the children’s fairy tale, and while a few such themes survive and make it into the newest Puss and Boots, nevertheless this self-reference and snobbish deconstructionism is thankfully and finally pushed to the background, a refreshing change from the grating and fourth-wall breaking cynicism one finds throughout modern cinema, particularly evident in the things that get churned out in the superhero genre.

The film serves rather to especially communicate the significance of having both gratitude and humility: gratitude in seeing and being thankful for what gifts one already has, and humility in recognizing and owning one’s limits and one’s humanity. The progression of the story warns the viewer against two sorts of failure: failure on account of a false overconfidence and bravado on the one hand, and failure by an equally false despair and slothfulness on the other. While any overt moralizing in the film is treated as an object of humor or of absurdity (Jiminy Cricket’s efforts at redeeming and talking the villain down are served for laughs), regardless the main thrust of the film sends a strong message about the importance of family, the necessity of true commitment in marriage, the goodness in loving one’s origins, and, surprisingly most of all for a Shrek film, the fact that looking at the world in a cynical manner often serves to cloud and darken our vision rather than to enlighten it.

Overall, the movie certainly provides an entertaining viewing experience, especially in its animation quality, and whatever it lacks in originality or “greatness” is entirely made up for when one simply surveys the catalog of other movies released around the same time, or when one compares it to its preceding Shrek films. It’s no Snow White, but it’s certainly a good development to see that, after so many fairy tale films aimed at the deconstruction of fairy tale films, this one entry can tell, in its most basic essence, a single pure-hearted fairy story.