The original Puss in Boots comes from Charles Perrault, who published the fairy tale in 1697 about a cat who talks his way into a fortune for a penniless master using nothing but confidence and a good pair of boots. DreamWorks kept the confidence and the boots and added a sword, a Spanish accent from Antonio Banderas, and an entrance in Shrek 2 in 2004 in which the character is hired to assassinate an ogre and switches sides within a scene. He was popular enough to earn a solo film in 2011 and a sequel, The Last Wish, in 2022 that turned out to be considerably darker than anyone expected from a Shrek spin-off.
That third film is the reason this quiz has the cast it does. Puss loses his eighth life in the opening minutes, learns that a bounty hunter with two sickles and a whistle is Death itself, and spends the rest of the story dealing with genuine fear for the first time. The panic attack he has partway through is animated straight, without a joke to release the tension, which is rare in a family film. The painterly, lower-frame-rate animation style used for the action sequences was a deliberate break from the smooth look of the earlier movies.
Which of three films’ worth of characters a person lands closest to depends on what they chase, what frightens them, and how they treat whoever attaches themselves along the way.
The options are drawn from opposite corners of the same story. Puss in Boots is bravado built on a real skill set, a legend who believed his own reputation until it ran out. Kitty Softpaws is the better thief of the two, guarded because of a betrayal she never fully forgave, and unwilling to be anyone’s sidekick. Perrito, the small dog who insists on calling himself a therapy dog, has survived a genuinely miserable life and responds by being relentlessly kind about it, which the film treats as strength rather than naivety. Humpty Dumpty is the friend who turns resentment into a decade-long plan. Goldilocks runs a crime family with three bears and spends the film working out what she is looking for, while Big Jack Horner is comic greed with no interior life at all, a running joke about a villain with nothing to redeem.
Jack and Jill, the Three Diablos, and the Wolf round out the list, which gives the sorting a real range between charm, ambition, loyalty, and menace.
Answer the way you would behave rather than the way the coolest result would. Whether you are the one making the plan, the one keeping everyone honest, or the one who stays cheerful when the odds are terrible is exactly the distinction these questions are built to find.
Possible results:
- Puss in Boots
- Kitty Softpaws
- Humpty Dumpty
- Jack & Jill
- The Three Diablos
- Goldilocks
- Big Jack Horner
- Perrito
- The Wolf (Death)
