“When the first Shrek movie came out, it was pretty groundbreaking,” said Joel Crawford, co-director of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Polygon said in a recent interview. “It was so impressive with CG [with] the detail you could feel and audiences were enthralled by this pursuit of photorealism. So about 20 years later Puss in Boots: The Last Wish Feel like a fairy tale for our time we said We have to push it.”
And he and co-director Januel Mercado did. Unlike the four Shrek films and the first Puss in Boots film, which all take a standard approach to photorealism in lighting and design, The Last Wish is more stylized. The backgrounds are lush. The lighting is less photographic and more like an impressionist painting. The movements are more exaggerated and flashy. It’s a massive departure from what audiences have come to expect from the Shrek franchise, but it was a departure the filmmakers were keen to walk away from.
“It’s been over 10 years since the last Puss in Boots, and it’s been over 20 years since the first Shrek,” says Mercado. “We always talk about how wonderfully animation technology and its visual storytelling have evolved over the years. We felt there was enough time to retain the essence of this world and these characters, but we were able to take full advantage of the new technologies and styles [with] who share these stories. We didn’t want to let this opportunity pass us by.”
Mercado and Crawford were inspired by animated projects like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, arcaneAnd The Bad Boys, not only for using stylized animation, but also for celebrating the media that inspired their stories. For spider verse, those were comics. And for The Last Wishthat meant fairytale illustrations.
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“I remember growing up reading children’s books,” says Mercado. “Especially storybooks and illustrations, and how vibrant those spreads would be and how easy they are for kids with just basic text and storytelling. But I remember spending hours as a kid just looking at the drawings and paintings and seeing all the details that are in the surroundings. […] We wanted to do the same with the medium of film Puss in Boots.”
“Our production designer, Nate Wragg, was really the one who dictated how we would express our specific story,” explains Crawford. “Especially in this fairytale style. And so it was a trial and error thing where we look at things and go, Oh, that’s too flat and graphic, or That’s too realistic. And so it’s really a process of finding it.”
Animation wasn’t the only element Crawford and Mercado wanted to advance with The Last Wish. After all, in 2001, Shrek was groundbreaking, not just for the CG, but for the edgy humor and more mature references that inspired a tonal shift in American animation for the next decade or so. Keep Puss in Boots relevant to the 2020s, the filmmakers wanted to revisit that sharp joke, but also expand the themes the film could explore and tell a deeper story.
“With the original Shrek films, there’s a fun play on what we know as fairy tales and the Disney princesses we love. There’s always this subversive attitude that’s clever and hilarious to experience,” says Mercado. “It’s always like this, Oh man, this is fun. I’ve never thought about it like that before. It’s cool to turn things upside down. That was something we wanted to return to and continue as part of the herd. And the other side of that is a real message too, and [an] emotional story to tell.”
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is currently available on demand as well as on DVD and Blu-ray.
