Shrek reportedly alive in the new Puss in Boots movie

polygon.com:

Breaking news: According to Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, the director and co-director of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Shrek is alive within the story’s timeline. Previously, I had theorized that the beloved green ogre actually passed away some time before the new movie, in order to better hammer home the movie’s message about mortality. But I am very pleased to report that the two DreamWorks Animation representatives refute the idea that Shrek is dead.

“We did not kill him,” Crawford tells me, stifling a laugh after I asked him about the fate of the ogre in the new movie.

Crawford and Mercado may not have killed Shrek (and also presumably did not kill Fiona, Donkey, and the rest of the characters from the franchise), but they do want to make it clear that time has passed in the Far, Far Away universe since Shrek Forever After. They estimate that it’s been about 10 years or so (approximately nine lifetimes for Puss), which they felt was important in order to keep the movie relevant.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia for Shrek, for Puss in Boots,” explains Crawford. “And audiences have grown up. We wanted the movie to grow up with them. You feel like you know that character, but there’s a history that happened when you’re meeting this character again. All of the characters feel like they’ve continued living. The world of Shrek has continued.”

In a way, it’s not too different from how the filmmakers behind the core Shrek series approached each sequel. Shrek 2 director Conrad Vernon once told Polygon that for every plot point that seemingly wrapped up in Shrek, the team considered the next step (so when it came to Donkey and Dragon, that naturally meant hybrid babies). In the case of The Last Wish, since the most recent