Today DreamWorks Animation held the kind of event that happens a few times a year here in New York, when an animation studio shows off some footage from an upcoming movie to give us a sense of what to look forward to. They actually showed half of Kung Fu Panda 2-- which still contains a lot of unfinished shots and even sketches-- and just 13 minutes of Puss in Boots, a spinoff for the character seen in the Shrek movies.
It's absolutely unfair to write any kind of review, but I did come away pleasantly surprised by Puss, which I was kinda dreading given the diminishing returns of the Shrek franchise. The bit we saw was light, funny and mercifully absent pop culture references; Antonio Banderas has the swashbuckling cat thing down pat, and we got a small glimpse at Salma Hayek's female opponent character. They even showed off a rough sketch of a scene featuring Zach Galifianakis as Humpty Dumpty and Guillermo del Toro as a gruff human character called El Commandante.
Puss in Boots doesn't hit theaters until November, and we've got Kung Fu Panda 2 to look forward to in the meantime, but I'm far more interested in the Shrek spinoff than I ever would have imagined. DreamWorks did their job today, I suppose.
