From the archive: "Puss in Boots"

The Toy Story series has kept its universe intact over the course of its sequels, so maybe we have the Shrek films to thank for the current state of play in the digimation game. After 2009's very ordinary Shrek Forever After, the producers retired their hulking green star and instead pushed on with Puss in Boots, an origin story for one of the franchise's more popular supporting players; that it played as successfully as it did on release in 2011 explains why we now have movies about Madagascar's penguins and Despicable Me's minions. (With the market growing increasingly competitive and desperate for new angles, every last pixelated clump began jostling for its own spin-off.) Where the Shreks were old-school 2D propositions, bedtime stories rewritten with a newly knowing tone, Puss (again voiced by Antonio Banderas) is very much a 21st century conception: a posturing superhero whose derring-do, leaps and swashbuckling are meant to be viewed in 3D. Around him, however, the film gets more than a little hesitant and defensive. Puss is given not one but two sidekicks - a crafty love interest (Salma Hayek) and a treacherous Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) - which speaks to a certain writers' room uncertainty as to whether their lead can actually carry a movie on his own. The story, meanwhile, is the kind of quest narrative that these diversions got bogged down in from the mid-Noughties onwards, no matter that it takes in magic beans, the Golden Goose and a sprouting, curling beanstalk that practically begs for the third dimension. Like the majority of DreamWorks' sequels and spinoffs, it's at least proficient about delivering more of what audiences enjoyed elsewhere: briskly paced, pleasingly sunny of hue, unobjectionable in its outlook, there's nothing here to leave you feeling ripped-off, exactly. Still, it seems telling that it barely runs to 75 minutes, and that there have been no further sequels since: what you're watching are the last drops of inspiration being squeezed from the tube.

(December 2014)

Puss in Boots is now streaming on Netflix, and available on DVD through DreamWorks Animation; a sequel, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, opens in cinemas nationwide Friday, and will be reviewed here in the days ahead.