Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’s directors let Shrek inspire the series’ reinvention

polygon.com:

“When the first Shrek movie came out, it was quite groundbreaking,” Joel Crawford, co-director of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, told Polygon in a recent interview. “With CG, it was so impressive [with] the detail that you could feel, and audiences were wowed by that chasing of photorealism. So in order to make, 20-something years later, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish feel like a fairy tale for our time, we said, We need to push it.”

And he and co-director Januel Mercado did. Unlike the four Shrek movies and the first Puss in Boots movie, which all take a standard approach to photorealism in lighting and design, The Last Wish is more stylized. The backgrounds are lush. The lighting looks less photographic and more like an impressionist painting. The movements are more exaggerated and eye-catching. It’s a massive departure from what audiences have come to expect from the Shrek franchise, but it was a departure the filmmakers were eager to take.

“It’s been over 10 years since the last Puss in Boots, and over 20 years since the first Shrek came out,” Mercado says. “We’re always talking about just how marvelous animation technology and its visual storytelling has evolved over the years. We felt like there’s been enough time where we could retain the essence of this world and these characters, but we could take full advantage of the new technology and styles [with] which to share these stories. We weren’t about to miss that opportunity.”

Mercado and Crawford were inspired by animated projects like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,Arcane, andThe Bad Guys, not just for their use of stylized animation, but for their celebration of the mediums that inspired their stories. For Spider-Verse, that was comic books. And for The Last