Rating B | Puss in Boots: The Last Wish： Only one step away from the boutique

1、Puss from 22 years ago

The protagonist of this animation is a puss from more than 20 years ago.

I thought I was in time travel when a friend recommended Puss in Boots 2 to me. Its previous film, Puss in Boots, was released in 2011. And it's from 2001's Shrek, which I watched in elementary ，It's been 22 years.

In 2001, Shrek was a popular animation， Even in my country, which is  far away from Hollywood, everyone was talking about this animation. Among them, the most popular one is Puss in Boots, which was my favorite character at that time. It looks cute, but it is a master swordsman. This setting is similar to the naughty and cute cat in reality, which is interesting.

22 years has past, I become an adult. Like Bing Bong in "Inside Out" who faded away as the main character grew up, this cat faded away from my life.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was the highest-rated animated film last year, with a rating of 7.9 on IMDB. On a quiet weekend night, I lay on the sofa at home and enjoyed this animation.

2. It's a good movie but not as good as the rating shows

Although it has good reviews from my friends and IMDB, I didn't expect much from it before watching it. I did not expect the sequel to a decent spin-off Dreamworks film from over a decade ago to be one of the most poignant, introspective, genuinely hilarious, and heartwarming films of the year. But here we are.

After an overly cheesy, somewhat clunky opening sequence, The Last Wish begins developing its zany assortment of characters into distinct quirky personalities with sympathetic desires and clear goals. The film juggles several character arcs and it's almost miraculous how it successfully handled all of them with proper set up and satisfying payoffs.

My favorite character in The Last Wish is Perro, a Chihuahua. It is a small, poor but optimistic animal.

When Puss asks its name, it replies like this：

"Oh, I've been called all kinds of things. Dog, Bad Dog, Stupid Dog.Hey You! You There! Get Out! Leave It! Drop It! Big Rat, Small Pig, Rat Face, Butt Nugget, * for Brains.You know, that sort of thing. But I've never had a name that really stuck, you know?"

Here's what it says when Puss asks about its past：

"My story? Oh.It's actually a very funny story.Back when I was a pup,me and my littermates lived with a family.A family full of pranksters who liked to play hide-and-seek,and I was always it.Pick on the little guy, am I right ? They tried putting me in a packing crate, a dumpster.No matter how hard they tried, I'd always find them.So, one day, they get creative and they put me in a sock with a rock in it.And then throw me in a river.I gnawed a hole in the sock,and I swam to the surface.Never found them or my littermates.So I guess I'm still it."

Perro's past is very sympathetic to me.

These two lines are wonderfully written, not only explaining Perro's experience of being abandoned, but also revealing its optimism. I raised a Teddy named Drumstick, and a stray cat named Cat. The story of Perro is similar to that of them. They are optimistic and enthusiastic like Drumstick, and the experience of being abandoned is like my Cat. Only people who love animals can write such lines.

For other animals, the director also designed different interesting plots according to their habits. Whether it's cat toilets, cat food, and cat scratching posts in animal shelters; or Puss's sharp claws, cute eyes, and dirty chins, these are very similar to reality and very interesting.

There are many characters in the movie. In addition to the Puss in Boots team, there are fake villains: the three bears and the little girl's family; real villains: the black mage and his servants. They all have their own story, a complete character arc. These stories are all completed that move me so much.

But these overly rich contents made the overall theme of the movie confusing, which eventually became the shortcoming of this animation.

I counted, in The Last Wish, there are a total of 8 characters with animals and people. It is a difficult problem to develop so many characters clearly in 100 minutes. The solution to this problem is to Let them pursue one thing, and the different choices they make lead to different endings. 12 Angry Men, Perfect Strangers, and many films directed by Woody Allen are good examples.

In The Last Wish, the problem is the "wish". Animals and people in the movie seem to pursue the same thing - a wish, but this wish is not the ultimate goal, but the process of realizingit. Puss  wants to have 9 lives again, Perro wants to be the same as now, Bear girl wants to have a real home, and the villain wants to have more magic power...Not only are the ultimate goals different, but the starting points are also different, which leads to the confusion of the characters in this animation.

It is too difficult to express so many motives and choices in such a short time. To do this, the director uses a lot of dialogue to push the story forward, and in the end, the rhythm of the film gets out of control. The rhythm is so fast that when the climax hits, audiences have no time to build up emotions.

At this point, Pixar's Inside Out and Soul are doing better. They both have a lot of quite scenes, which are important to the story.

My conclusion: The Last Wish is an animation that moved me, but it is still far from a boutique.

Rating： B