Like many people, I was glad to see Dreamworks Animation finally end the Shrek franchise last year. I felt that the franchise had pretty much worn out its welcome, and considering that Dreamworks has come up with new, utterly charming stuff like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, there simply wasn't any need for dipping into the ogre well anymore.
I confess, then, that I wasn't too keen the announcement of a Shrek spinoff, Puss in Boots. I liked the character and how he was a riff on Zorro, the character whom voice-actor Antonio Banderas had revitalized in the late 1990s, but I wasn't really looking forward to another hour and a half of pop-culture references, Hollywood inside jokes and borderline toilet humor.
To my utter surprise, Dreamworks Animation has put together a film that is more in keeping with Panda and Dragon than any of the Shrek movies in that there seems to be a genuine attempt to put heart over snark. Sure, there's plenty of clever humor in it, including one Fight Club reference, and the fairy-tale lampooning that made the first couple of Shrek movies so engaging is back with a vengeance but there's still a notable difference in tone from past Shrek films.
Puss in Boots is an outlaw in search of a big score. He learns that the one big score he seeks is the quest for three magic beans which will take him to a castle in the sky, where he will find a goose that lays golden eggs. After an unsuccessful attempt to steal the magic beans from hillbilly outlaws Jack and Jill, he finds himself recruited by an old acquaintance, Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianikis) with whom Puss apparently has an unpleasant history. Puss, Humpty and a sexy female cat thief, Kitty Soft Paws (Salma Hayek) then team up to get the beans from Jack and Jill and get to the castle in the sky. There are, however, a couple of nasty surprises in store.
In terms of technical proficiency, Dreamworks has never had a problem keeping up with its rivals at Pixar; the characters are every bit as meticulously rendered and every bit as lifelike. One would expect no less from a studio that Steven Spielberg co-created.
Where Dreamworks has most often fallen short is in infusing their films with the heart that has characterized almost virtually all of Pixar's movies (with the possible exception of the exceedingly crass Cars 2). Apart from a surprisingly touching Shrek, for years the folks at DW Animation couldn't really seem to nail what Pixar had elevated into an art form, so they abandoned the concept altogether and just decided to go for belly laughs. They've been mostly successful with their efforts, though I wasn't a fan of a lot of their movies, such as Shark Tale, both Madagascar movies, A Bee Movie or Monsters vs. Aliens. A lot of the time, with their celebrity casting and pop-culture references ad nauseam felt like products being popped off a conveyor belt, especially considering that Dreamworks often releases more than one movie a year.
With Panda and Dragon, though, Dreamworks showed that they are fully capable of both humor and heart, even though the yuks still remain their bread and butter in the story department.
PIB has plenty of laughs and liberally pokes fun at fairy tale conventions (as well as at the whole Zorro mythos), but there's a surprising amount of heart in the proceedings as well, which was not something I was expecting out of a movie spun out of the long-soulless Shrek franchise. The relationships between Puss and Humpty, Puss and Kitty, and Puss and his adoptive mother, while not exactly nuanced, are all nonetheless quite well developed in the course of the film and they give it a nice center.
That said, given that Puss is, in this incarnation anyway, a riff on Banderas' own portrayal of Zorro, the film is inevitably derivative in many ways, though of course in the spirit of homage and parody. Still, I wasn't a huge fan of how they basically ripped off much of the music score of The Mask of Zorro. Ah well, nobody's perfect.
If this succeeds at the box-office, another franchise is inevitable, and should that happen, here's hoping that DW have learned from the decline of Shrek and come up with good sequels this time.
Rating: 4/5
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