'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish': another fun recital by Antonio Banderas

2022-12-23T11:14:19.798Z

A stupendous adventure film that does not intend to give moral, social, cultural and vital lessons at every step and that is committed to effervescent entertainment

A fun adventure film that does not intend to give moral, social, cultural and vital lessons at every step and that, nevertheless, ends up offering them: the need for effervescent entertainment, the importance of art in visual composition, and a subtle and simple, but profound moral.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

arrives without the ethical ambitions of other recent animated productions, some better than others, but it perfectly complies with something that is too often forgotten: the Dionysian sense of existence and its terrible distorting mirror, which lives, even those of cats, who have seven or nine, depending on whether they are Latino or Anglo-Saxon, end.

And also Antonio Banderas offers a recital.

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Antonio Banderas: "It bothers me a lot to have to die"

Born in the animated division of the production company DreamWorks as a secondary character in

Shrek 2

(2004), and naturally inspired by Jacques Perrault's classic tale, Puss in Boots managed to have his own project with the 2011 film of the same name, an

irresistible

spin off

, although somewhat short in flight, which stood out above all for the vocal spectacle of Banderas, for the echoes of classic adventure reworked for kids of new generations, and for the evident cocky streak coming from

The Mask of Zorro,

by Martin Campbell, which also had had the actor from Malaga as a star.

But the fact that it took over a decade to bring the character back, and at a time when sequelae multiply like viruses, shows that the character's insolence had been somewhat forgotten.

Perhaps this is why the creative fruits of Joel Crawford —co-directed by Januel Mercado— are so surprising, until now in minor but festive products such as

The Croods: a new era,

in a twilight-style film, as in certain Western films, although only in the plot and not in the forms, much more luminous than those

westerns

in which the characters' time runs out, and which are accompanied by an expressionist or even gloomy light.

The goofy, arrogant and jocular cat is forced to become aware that his time is running out.

He does the math and it turns out that he has already been killed eight times and he only has one life left, which leads him not only to an existential crisis but to something much more relevant in his case: fear.

He is no longer for heroism, conceit or audacity.

He is for calm and, if they come up against his enemies, for flight.

And it is not so much a question of avoiding risks as of lack of vital meaning.

In two words, he is sunk.

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However, despite the dramatic situation, Crawford's film is hilarious and humorous.

The humor is constant;

the rhythm, hectic;

there are occasional songs that contribute little, but don't bother at all, and the cadence of the shots in some sequences, imitating the rhythm of comic strips in pictorially inspired images, a joy.

Thus, until an outcome with a clear message from which other stories for children could learn: it's okay to make wishes, but their fulfillment will never be given by magic, but by what we ourselves do to achieve it.

A separate chapter deserves the work of Antonio Banderas as the protagonist, both in the English version and in the one dubbed into Spanish.

A show loaded with grace, charm, articulations with the accent, juicy nuances in his wounded vanity, and wonderful inflections of his only interpretive tool in this case: his voice.