After making a bajillion dollars the Shrek franchise is finally moving into the realm of spin-offs. Puss in Boots is getting his own movie. In it Antonio Banderas continues to voice the character and the movie will be a prequel, telling the tale of Puss’s early adventures teamed up with Humpty Dumpty (voiced by Zach Galifianakis) and Kitty (voiced by Salma Hayek) in a quest to save the Goose who laid the Golden Eggs.

You won’t see any of that in the first Puss in Boots trailer, but you will see Puss strutting his stuff.

Watch the first trailer for Puss in Boots below or in HD on Apple. We’ll talk afterwards.

Giving Puss in Boots his own spin-off seemed like a good idea, back when the character first showed up in Shrek 2. Since then, like everything in the Shrek universe, he’s sort of been ruined by the sequels. He even got fat in the last one. But the spin-off's coming anyway and it’s going to make a lot of money because it’ll probably contain at least one dance number. That's what these movies do.

Even this first Puss in Boots trailer is really just sort of one, extended dance number. Granted there’s no actual dancing, just a lot of preening set to a base-driven beat, but it’s basically the same thing. It’s hard to be optimistic about any of this. The future of animation, outside of the world of Pixar, is more likely to belong to movies like Rango.

For more on Puss in Boots, without all my negativity, visit it's page in our Blend Film Database.