With Phenomenal ‘Puss in Boots,’ DreamWorks Has Bested Disney

There’s one thing you need to know about me: I’m obsessed with Shrek. Shrek, the iconic breakthrough film from DreamWorks Animation, was the first DVD I ever bought (alongside S Club Party Live, but that’s a story for another day). I rang in my 30th birthday in by watching Shrek. Watching the Shrek movies is an annual tradition for me—and I mean all four of them, including the criminally underrated Shrek Forever After. I think about it far more than is deemed acceptable in society.

Of course, I was excited for Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the sequel to a 2011 Shrek spin-off about the Zorro-aping feline. I didn’t want to know anything going in, refusing to watch the trailer or find out any detail—it’s freaking Puss! In! Boots! That’s more than enough for me. I couldn’t wait to see a truly iconic kitty save the day, or whatever he was going to do.

Sure, the franchise has had a few moving moments, but Shrek movies are far more content with joking around, being irreverent and silly. I went in hoping for a cute, fun distraction, and came out with what might just have been the finest animated film of 2022.

From its sense of sadness to its truly scary villain, The Last Wish signals a change: This is not the DreamWorks you think you know. That change is one that DreamWorks has been building for the last few years—and all the pieces finally came together in 2022.

The Last Wish opens with a truly epic showdown between Puss (Antonio Banderas) and a giant. It’s a thrilling sequence scored to a catchy song about how amazing this death-defying kitty is. It’s delightful—a breezy, funny scene, like we’d come to expect from animation studio DreamWorks. The studio has been better known for its funky characters and sassy humor than its introspection, and this film seemed like it could be more of the same.

But after the epic standoff, there’s a brilliant and unexpected shift. Puss sits in a dark bar and begins to ponder his mortality. Of course, cats have nine lives, but Puss is so daring that he’s never even bothered to consider how many he’s used up. But when a ruthless bounty hunter known as the Wolf (Wagner Moura) appears and is hellbent on eliminating everyone’s favorite cat, Puss realizes he’s down to his very last life.

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The face-off should be no problem for our booted feline, but shockingly, Puss is completely outmatched by the Wolf. He doesn’t stand a chance, narrowly escaping the encounter with his life. But the Wolf has no intention of giving up his hunt. In a desperate move, Puss sets off to find the mythical “last wish” to restore his lost lives.

That’s heavy. Let’s take a second to look back at 2011’s Puss in Boots, which saw Puss team up with…Humpty Dumpty and Kitty Softpaws…to recover some magical beans. It’s nice, sweet fun, but the thematic change between this Puss in Boots film and the first one is surprising. It shows that DreamWorks, like Puss, has done a lot of growing up over the last decade.

That doesn’t mean the studio has become completely averse to straight-up lovely, popcorn-munching family entertainment. Instead, DreamWorks has managed to do some remarkable alchemy, combining two very different worlds of storytelling together. The Last Wish is on par with the works of something we’d more closely associate with the emotional whimsy of Disney.

Since Disney ditched traditional animation in the late 2000s (I have still not recovered) and diving headlong into CGI of its own accord, it has landed hit after hit. Films like Tangled recaptured the musical magic that we loved about its most classic hand-drawn films. You can’t even say the word Frozen anymore without “Let it Go” creeping into your brain.

But DreamWorks, which started eating Disney’s lunch creatively after it launched in the late 1990s, started to falter. Despite successes like Kung-Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, DreamWorks’ crop became increasingly inconsistent. The studio faded behind Disney’s enormous, all-encompassing mouse ears.

Then—stop me if you’ve heard this before—the pandemic changed everything. Cinemas were shut, but there were movies ready to be released. What the heck was going to happen? At a time of great uncertainty, one movie changed the landscape of moviegoing forever. That movie was (drumroll please) Trolls World Tour.

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With Trolls World Tour, DreamWorks—a major studio—decided to do something unheard of. In April 2020, it released its new big-budget film as a video-on-demand release. For $19.99, families stuck at home could watch something they would definitely have paid money to see in theaters. Nobody knew if it would work, but it paid off, reportedly earning close to $100 million in its first three weeks. DreamWorks hit a home run commercially, and theatrical releases haven’t been the same since.

While some films (hi, Avatar, Top Gun: Maverick, and anything Marvel) have flourished in cinemas since they’ve reopened, there’s so much expectation that things will come to streaming so soon after they’re released that there doesn’t seem to be any incentive to go to cinemas. For better or worse, it started with Trolls.

DreamWorks shifted gears and went straight back into cinemas as soon as possible. Its next film, December 2020’s The Croods: A New Age, raked in over $200 million worldwide, despite being released in theaters in the heat of the pandemic. For pandemic-era moviegoing, that is monumental.

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While DreamWorks went straight back to cinemas, its biggest rival, Disney, took a different approach. The studio's first animated project released in the pandemic, March 2021’s Raya and the Last Dragon, released in theaters—but also on Disney+ Premier Access, for $29.99, on top of a regular Disney+ subscription. Encanto followed that November; it did OK in cinemas, before finding more success on Disney+ exactly a month after. It felt like an odd decision, effectively cutting the film off at its legs as it was building momentum. People knew it was coming to Disney+ for free right at Christmastime, so why bother paying extra?

Things came to a screeching halt this past November, with Disney’s most recent film, Strange World. It was released with hardly any marketing and earned a shockingly, humiliatingly low $70 million at the worldwide box office. It didn’t help that the six people that knew the film existed (me included) knew it would inevitably come to Disney+ soon, and it did, just a few weeks later.

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Meanwhile, Disney’s acquired animation studio, Pixar, has had three of its last four films go directly to Disney+, something that would have been absolutely unthinkable before the pandemic. Disney/Pixar infuriatingly doubled-down on this tactic by releasing 2022’s fantastic Turning Red straight to streaming, when cinemas were very open. But Pixar’s only theatrical release, Lightyear, tanked—a disaster, especially considering its Toy Story pedigree.

Disney’s mismanagement is part of why DreamWorks suddenly found itself on top of the animation world in 2022. Technically, the animated box office winner last year was Illumination, as Minions: The Rise of Gru raked in nearly $1 billion worldwide. But let’s be real: Besides children and a freakishly devoted fanbase, Illumination hasn’t done anything to make animation obsessives take notice. The studio is very good at making money, but when it comes to making a real impact in the animation world, it’s got quite a long way to go. But April’s The Bad Guys, DreamWorks’ very well-received comedy about a group of morally complicated criminals, was the second-highest grossing 2022 animated film. That’s a big win, especially as The Bad Guys is not a sequel or franchise release.

Another key reason DreamWorks is emerging as animation’s leader is its incredible new visual style. In an Indiewire interview, VFX supervisor Matt Baer explained that the aim of The Bad Guys was “to create images that look handmade and illustrated while still maintaining a sense of physical light and volume…Our design philosophy was to use simplification to achieve our stylized look.”

The visual difference in DreamWorks’ films now is extraordinary. The Bad Guys looks like a comic book come to life, while Puss in Boots: The Last Wish looks like a fairy tale book in motion. The film looks utterly astonishing, featuring some jaw-dropping action set-pieces. It's hard to oversell, frankly; it really is just that beautiful.

Before the pandemic, moviegoers would have considered DreamWorks the very definition of playing it safe. Many of its films were sequels following the same formula: humor first, heart a distant second. But with this breathtaking new visual style, stories that can get darker and deeper (without losing their family-friendly appeal), and a full-blooded commitment to cinemas, DreamWorks had its most impressive year yet in 2022. Its main competitors' identities are muddled, but DreamWorks couldn’t be clearer, offering up visually astonishing emotionally robust family entertainment. Strap in and get ready, because the DreamWorks renaissance has arrived—go see The Last Wish if you don’t believe me.

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