Puss in Boots

Puss in Boots - ***

Directed by: Chris Miller

Starring (Voices): Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayak, Zack Galifianakis

Review:  The ‘Shrek’ movies started out brilliantly but ended up losing their luster.  What started out as a genius poke at fairy tales, ended becoming what it was making fun of.  A generation of kids has grown up loving Shrek.  To them, that’s their fairy tale.  It has permeated the social consciousness.  That was the ‘Shrek’ franchises ultimate undoing. 

In order to breathe new life into the franchise ‘Shrek’ creators took the most popular secondary character and went with it.  Puss in Boots now has his own movie.  The feline mercenary for hire never really had any back story or history from the original Shrek movies.  He appeared in ‘Shrek 2’ and became a fixture in the series.  Immediately the Spanish accented hairball chucker became one of the most popular characters around.

Now that the Shrek series has finished, Puss finally gets his time to shine.  Just as they did with Shreck Puss finds himself encountering many different famous fairy tale characters.  He has a history with Humpty Dumpty, he encounters Jack and Jill, and his ultimate quest is to find the magic beans that Jack had to grow a vine to the heavens.

In his quest Puss will cross paths with the uber thief Kitty Softpaws (Hayak).  Puss and his posse will trek to any place necessary in order to find those magic beans.  This includes many new places as well as some places from Puss’ past. 

What we get here is a fun little story that explains the tale of Puss in Boots with a little more depth.  There is no great reality here and nothing that ties in too closely with the previous Shrek movies.  All their focused on here is giving a neat little origin story and having some fun with it.  The storylines and characters aren’t particularly highly developed, but they have a fun time with it nonetheless.  The voice acting could have been better (except for Banderes who is top notch as usual).

Ultimately, if you’re a fan of higher brow animated movies, it’s worth your time.