Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
★★★½ — Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
Released in December 2022, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish arrives as the second standalone film featuring the swashbuckling feline who first appeared in Shrek 2 back in 2004. The premise this time is a fairly meaty one for an animated family film: Puss discovers he has squandered eight of his nine lives through sheer reckless bravado, and sets off to find a mythical Last Wish that might restore what he has lost. It is the sort of setup that gives a production room to do something genuinely interesting with themes of mortality and consequence, and DreamWorks Animation, to their credit, leaned into that rather than shying away from it. The film arrives nearly eleven years after the first Puss in Boots (2011), a gap that gave the creative team time to reconsider what the character could actually sustain on his own terms. The visual approach here is notably different too, drawing on a more stylised, painterly aesthetic that owes something to modern hand-drawn traditions and sits apart from the glossy photorealism that dominates much of the animated feature landscape.
Joel Crawford directs, having previously helmed The Croods: A New Age (2020) for DreamWorks. The film reunites Antonio Banderas with the role that has, in many ways, become one of the defining characters of his later career. Banderas has been lending his voice to Puss since 2004, and the part suits him in a way that feels almost cosmically appropriate, given his history playing magnetic, roguish leads in films like Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Salma Hayek Pinault returns as Kitty Softpaws, and the supporting cast is rounded out by Harvey Guillén, Wagner Moura as the film's antagonist Death (a properly unsettling presence), and Florence Pugh, who joins the franchise fresh from a run of high-profile live-action work. For an animated film, the voice cast carries some genuine dramatic weight, which serves the material well given how much the story rests on the shoulders of its characters rather than pure spectacle. Fans of the broader DreamWorks animation catalogue, and indeed anyone who has followed the blog's coverage of films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Josep, will find points of comparison here in how animation can carry emotional and thematic weight that live-action sometimes struggles to match.
The film runs at a brisk 103 minutes and carries a tone that is, by turns, playful and surprisingly sombre, a combination that tends to divide audiences expecting something lighter from the Shrek universe. Whether that tonal blend pays off is, of course, the question.
The real MVP is the cricket. Yes, really. That tiny, flamboyant, pitch-perfect therapist bug who shows up for two minutes and steals the entire film. Worth the price of admission alone. The rest is solid, but not spectacular. It’s got heart, some surprisingly dark themes (mortality! therapy! fear of death!), and some truly gorgeous animation especially in the fairy tale forest and the Wishing Star sequences. It’s a step up from the first sequel, no doubt, and Antonio Banderas still purrs his way through every scene with maximum charm. But aside from the cricket and a few clever gags, it plays it pretty safe. Familiar Shrek-verse humor wrapped in a slightly edgier package. Good, not groundbreaking. But hey, any movie that makes me laugh at a cricket deserves points.
For me, that cricket sums up what this film both achieves and misses in equal measure. When it lands, it lands brilliantly, with a kind of confident, offbeat wit that suggests DreamWorks could push further into genuinely surprising territory if they trusted themselves to do so more often. The darkness around the edges is welcome, and Banderas clearly has affection for this character that comes through in every line reading. I just wish the film had the courage to be as strange and fleet-footed throughout as it is in those brief, electric moments. A polished but unremarkable adventure, then, with one truly unforgettable insect.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2025-07-22
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More with Antonio Banderas: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) · Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) · Desperado (1995)
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
