Warning: Contains spoilers for Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.Much has been said about there being three different Pinocchio movies in 2022, but surprisingly enough, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish can be seen as the secret fourth Pinocchio movie of 2022. The original Pinocchio story by Carlo Collodi is over 100 years old, and as such, it’s naturally been adapted dozens of different times. The 1940 Disney movie is undoubtedly the most famous, but it’s also been adapted into live-action shows, theatrical productions, and, of course, other animated movies.
2022 was another year of new Pinocchio content, and by sheer coincidence, there ended up being three new Pinocchio movies that year: the live-action remake of the Disney Pinocchio, the Tom Kenny and Pauly Shore voiced Pinocchio: A True Story, and Netflix’s Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. The fact that three different Pinocchio movies were released in 2022 ended up drawing a lot of attention from people, especially since they each had widely different interpretations of the original story. What many people likely never thought about, however, was that there was one movie that could be construed as a fourth Pinocchio movie in 2022: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
Why Puss In Boots 2 Was Secretly A Pinocchio Movie
The idea of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish secretly being a Pinocchio movie comes down to the characters in the movie. For starters, Shrek’s Pinocchio has a small cameo in the movie, so it fits the basic requirement of having Pinocchio in the movie. Not only that, but DreamWorks' Puss in Boots: The Last Wish features a parody of Jiminy Cricket called the Ethical Bug who, just like Jiminy, is a kindhearted talking bug who tries to help people do good. All in all, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish contains some of the basic elements of Pinocchio, so it can, in fact, be construed as a Pinocchio movie.
That idea is even stronger thanks to the Ethical Bug’s role in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Just like Jiminy Cricket, the Ethical Bug acts as someone’s conscience to help them become a good person, the person in question here being one of the villains of the movie, Jack Horner. That plot thread ended up running through a large portion of 2022's Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and because of that, the humor of its Pinocchio parody ended up working far better than it would if the parody was just a simple, quick gag.
Puss In Boots 2 Is A Dark Parody Of Pinocchio
One of the most amusing things about Puss in Boots: The Last Wish having elements of a Pinocchio story is that it ends up being a dark parody of Pinocchio. As previously mentioned, the Ethical Bug tries to act as Jack Horner’s conscience, only for Jack to routinely ignore the Ethical Bug and commit increasingly heinous acts throughout the movie, eventually culminating in the Ethical Bug turning against Jack by destroying the last piece of the map he needed to activate the Wishing Star. In short, their dynamic shows what would happen if Pinocchio refused to be a good person and Jiminy Cricket got tired of him.
Joel Crawford's Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has a darkly comedic take on Pinocchio, and it manages to make it work. Not only is that sort of writing par for the course with the Shrek franchise’s shtick of fairy tale parodies, but its having such a unique interpretation of Pinocchio allowed for it to stand out among all the other Pinocchio movies of 2022, all of which kept to the basic framework of the story to varying degrees. Thanks to that, even if it wasn’t intentional, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish more than deserves a place with the other Pinocchio movies of 2022.