Movies

‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ and Post-Spiderverse Animated Films

Puss in Boots is one of the many western animated films which exist in the Post-Spiderverse era of western animated films. What is the Post-Spiderverse era? It is characterized by an explosion in creativity in the animation itself, an expression in the details, the designs, the artistic style and the aesthetics.

This is most evident with the film we will be discussing today, but we can also see it in subtler ways in the two latest Pixar films, Turning Red and Luca, which include flourishes to their animation style which were not found in previous Pixar films. Turning Red in particular leans further into a creative animation style, but this is not what people are really pointing to in expressive and creative animation.

The pioneer of this style was Sony, and the one who took inspiration from it was DreamWorks, with their latest two films, The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, fully committing to an expressive and creative animation style.

But there are a lot of characteristics that are a part of this era which many are not identifying and talking about but are expressed explicitly in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. What are these characteristics? They are the themes that are tackled, the way the story is told, and how the story unfolds.