Puss In Boots: The Last Wish Took Inspiration From The Anime Classic, Akira
Did anyone out there have "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" being one of the most critically acclaimed and aesthetically ambitious animated films of the year on their 2022 bingo card? Because if you did, you might want to consider a career investing in stocks. (Just maybe not Netflix's.)
A sequel to the 2011 "Shrek" spinoff film "Puss in Boots," "The Last Wish" finds the adorable, boots-wearing orange tabby Puss — Antonio Banderas, bringing much of the same charm and swagger that he had playing Zorro — in a bit of a pickle. Having burned through eight of his nine lives performing various acts of derring-do (that and just plain carelessness), Puss is forced to finally hang up his cavalier hat and spend the rest of his days dwelling on his inevitable mortality (until a literal life-saving MacGuffin presents itself, that is). It's a plot twist that lends what /Film's Josh Spiegel aptly describes as a "somewhat unexpected heaviness" to the film in his review — but, then again, "The Last Wish" is no mere attempt to cash in on the oddly (?) enduring appeal of the smelly green ogre and his four-legged companions.
Speaking to Variety, "The Last Wish" director Joel Crawford talked about wanting to use the film to expand Puss' corner of the Shrek-verse while also embracing the unique 2D and 3D hybrid animation approach popularized by 2018's "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." Much like that multiversal superhero romp, the "Puss in Boots" sequel draws from a myriad of influences to create its own distinct art style, including that of anime. More specifically, the classic anime film "Akira."
'It was beyond anything I've ever experienced'
I don't know about you, but when I think of "Puss in Boots," the first thing that comes to my mind is definitely Katsuhiro Otomo's landmark 1988 cyberpunk anime film about brutal military forces battling motorbike rebel gangs and kids with almost God-level telekinetic powers in a dystopian Japanese setting. All wise-guy antics aside, Joel Crawford explained it wasn't so much the subject matter of "Akira" that shaped "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" as it was the film's richly-detailed 2D animated visuals:
"I remember [as a young child seeing] the hand-drawn explosions and the whole thing felt so epic. It was beyond anything I've ever experienced, I was drawing dust clouds afterward and they were characters themselves. It was fun to take on that inspiration and design the shape of the characters, but also the action of the world."
"Akira" has observably influenced plenty of live-action American movies over the years, some of which simply pay homage to its iconography (like Rian Johnson's "Looper") while others directly re-imagine its most memorable imagery in a whole new context (as Jordan Peele does in "Nope"). Being animated, however, "The Last Wish" is able to go further in emulating the spirit of the film's aesthetics.
Writing about the footage he saw at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, /Film's Rafael Motamayor noted that "The Last Wish" achieves its inventive look by using "painterly textures, 2D effects, and even playing with the frame rate." In doing this, it's better able to imitate the impressionist animation of anime works like "Akira," where (as Crawford noted in his interview with Variety) even inanimate objects start to feel like living, breathing entities.
Achieving a personal touch
Among the benefits of this approach is that it helps set "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" apart from the many hyper-realistic 3D animated feature films released by the likes of Disney, Pixar, and even the film's own production house, DreamWorks Animation, for much of the last two decades. "It made it feel fantastical, and the experience of it as an audience is you get to see these exaggerated movements and gestures during the action," Joel Crawford added.
Another perk is that it gives "The Last Wish" more of a personal touch than your average 3D animated film. Where traditional anime like "Akira" naturally has the same hand-crafted look as other forms of 2D animation and stop-motion animation, that's much harder to achieve with computer animation. "So much of art is the human touch, and that's what was exciting," said Crawford. "We wanted to get back to the artist and reduce the imprint of the computer."
By the look of it, he and his team succeeded in doing just that and with flying colors. Audiences can see the results for themselves when "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" charges into U.S. theaters on December 21, 2022.