Puss in Boots

A Cat Who Knows He’s a Cartoon

I keep thinking about the first time Puss in Boots lets the camera linger on Antonio Banderas’s little orange outlaw as if he’s not a gag or a side character but a full-blown myth. That’s the movie’s funniest idea and, for a while, its best one: take a creature designed for a punch line and build him up with the solemn grammar of a swashbuckler. Chris Miller’s film arrived in 2011 as a spin-off — one of those projects that can sound like studio arithmetic on paper — but it’s more interesting than the cynical label suggests.

It’s a prequel, yes, and a commercial extension of the Shrek universe, but it also works as a small act of reclamation: a minor character promoted to leading-man status and treated with total seriousness, even when the joke is that he’s never serious for a second.

What’s surprising, watching it now, is how much the movie commits to old-fashioned adventure grammar. Miller — who’d already handled the third Shrek film — doesn’t just riff on fairy tales; he borrows from the Sergio Leone playbook, the romantic caper, the buddy-betrayal story, and the duel-at-high-noon western. The central conversation around the movie, at the time and still a little today, was whether a character this self-consciously marketable could carry his own film without being flattened by gimmick.

I think the answer is: mostly yes, because the movie understands that Puss isn’t funny merely because he’s a cat in boots. He’s funny because he’s a cat who performs himself. He poses, preens, draws a line between his public legend and his private panic, and the film keeps finding ways to make that split feel human.

Antonio Banderas helps enormously. His voice has always carried a little velvet and a little mischief, but here he leans into something more nuanced: vanity shaded by fatigue. You can hear years of seduction, bluffing, and swordplay in the way he lets certain words purr and others snap shut.

Banderas had already spent a long stretch playing handsome rogues and wounded romantics in live-action, and that history matters. He doesn’t sound like a celebrity doing a voice; he sounds like a performer translating a type he’s inhabited for decades into animation’s brighter register. Opposite him, Salma Hayek Pinault gives Kitty Softpaws a kind of dry, watchful intelligence that keeps the film from becoming a one-cat vanity parade.