A Cat Who Wears His Own Myth
Puss in Boots begins on the page, not the screen. The story was first written down by Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola in Le piacevoli notti (1550s), where a cat helps a poor young man win a kingdom through cunning rather than force. Giambattista Basile gave it another outing in Lo cunto de li cunti (1634), but the version that conquered the world came from Charles Perrault in 1697, collected in Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Perrault's Puss, resourceful and a little morally flexible, became the template: boots, swagger, a hapless master, and a villain outsmarted by wit.
For two centuries the story lived mostly in pantomime and illustrated editions. The 20th century brought animated shorts, European TV adaptations, and stage productions, but Puss remained a supporting act until 2004, when DreamWorks cast Antonio Banderas to voice him in Shrek 2 and effectively created a new character who happened to share the old cat's name. The spin-off films and Netflix series that followed are, for most viewers alive today, the primary text. The fairy tale became a franchise, and the franchise became its own mythology.
Every Version of Puss in Boots
The source tale and every major adaptation across media
Puss in Boots Through the Ages
- 1550sStraparola writes the first cat-helper tale in Le piacevoli notti
- 1634Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti retells the story
- 1697Perrault's definitive text published in Histoires ou contes du temps passe
- 1922Early stop-motion animated short by Ladislas Starevich
- 1969Toei Animation feature film directed by Kimio Yabuki for Japanese audiences
- 1985Faerie Tale Theatre TV episode starring Gregory Hines as Puss
- 1988Canon Movie Tales live-action film
- 2004Antonio Banderas voices Puss in Shrek 2, stealing the film
- 2007Puss returns in Shrek the Third
- 2010Shrek Forever After, marketed as the final chapter
- 2011DreamWorks solo film Puss in Boots released
- 2015The Adventures of Puss in Boots Netflix animated series premieres
- 2022Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, widely considered the series peak
The Last Wish is the best animated film of 2022 and it is not close
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) arrived with low expectations and left audiences genuinely shaken. Director Joel Crawford and the team at DreamWorks Animation used a hand-painted visual style borrowed from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and then did something harder: they built a story about a cocky immortal forced to reckon with mortality. The Death villain is one of the best antagonists in recent animation. That this is technically the sixth film in a franchise built on a fairy-tale parody is almost absurd.
If You Love the Swashbuckling Fairy-Tale Energy
Classic stories retold with wit, action, and a wink
The 1969 Toei film is the strangest and most underrated version
Toei Animation's 1969 feature, directed by Kimio Yabuki, is one of the first theatrically released feature-length animated films from Japan aimed at a broad audience. It is loose with the Perrault source, inventive in its visual design, and cheerfully anarchic in tone. It spawned two sequels in the early 1970s, all starring the same cat. Western audiences rarely encounter it, which is a genuine shame.
If You Love the DreamWorks Puss Specifically
Animated films with big heart, sharp comedy, and genuine emotional weight
If You Love the Perrault Source Material
Fairy tales and folk stories with trickster heroes and clever underdogs
Shrek the Third: give it a miss
Shrek the Third (2007) has Puss in it, which is its main selling point, and even that is underused. The film is the only entry in the Shrek franchise that feels genuinely bored by its own characters. Puss and Donkey swap bodies for a gag that arrives and departs without consequence. If you are making your way through the Shrek-to-Puss pipeline, this is the one to watch at 1.5x speed.