Oscar spotlight: How ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ used hybrid animation and proved ‘some franchises only get better with age’

Ronald Meyer
·4 min read
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“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” landed in theaters this past December with minimal pre-release fanfare, but the “Shrek” franchise’s sixth entry, besides collecting an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature and nearly $400 million at the global box office, has turned out to be one of 2022’s most visually arresting and critically acclaimed animated efforts. The Oscar contender conspicuously blends analog and 3D-rendered animation, employing a hybrid style popularized by “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”

The technique isn’t new, as films have been combining formats to one degree or another since at least 1991. However, the difference between “The Beauty and the Beast,” “The Iron Giant” and “Tarzan,” which used 2D backdrops to provide 3D objects a sense of depth, and more recent examples, like “Into the Spider-Verse,” “The Bad Guys” and “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” is the integration of “hand-drawn” and CGI elements in the foreground—sometimes even to render single layers of fur or leather.

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The film directed by Joel Crawford currently holds an impressive 95% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critics consensus reading, “Arriving more than a decade after the previous installment, the smart, sweet, and funny ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ proves some franchises only get better with age.”

“The Last Wish” is part of an “Into the Spiderverse”-catalyzed shift away from the photorealism that characterizes the bulk of mainstream computer-animated efforts released over the past 20 years. Instead of veritably mimicking light, shadow, and reflection,  these projects use darker and lighter gradients of a given color to imbue the visuals with a texture many have compared to an oil painting’s. Furthermore, hatch marks and zip ribbons–the line work seen in comic book panels to create shade and simulate motion–enhance the illusion that audiences are watching vintage, hand-illustrated animation.

SEE 2023 Oscars: Best Animated Feature Predictions

If hybridization was earlier a means by which to make invisible the craft’s cogs and wheels, now the goal is to highlight those same processes as an artistic feature rather than a bug or technical shortcoming that needs to be disguised. As the medium advances, it keeps reverting to and romanticizing the methods of the past. In addition to making apparent the seams between two and three-dimensional objects, “Puss in Boots” animated its action scenes “on twos,” meaning that images were held for a twelfth of a second. Believing the motion in animated films has become too smooth, Henry Selick elected to similarly antiquate his recent stop-motion feature, “Wendell & Wild.” This creates the blinkered, or “crunchy,” effect discussed by the producers of “Into the Spider-Verse.”

DreamWorks produced “The Last Wish” for about $90 million, which, as Chelsea Robson and Morgan Stradling of the Animation Addicts podcast have pointed out, is half the budget of a typical Pixar feature. Successful runs for “The Bad Guys” and “The Last Wish” should, instead of sending studios clamoring for identical content and chasing trends, encourage them to continue creating innovative viewing experiences that remix rather than conform to the physical world. Gold Derby’s combined Oscar odds rank “The Last Wish” fourth, ahead of “The Sea Beast” and behind “Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio,” Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” and “Turning Red.”

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