DreamWorks Learned A Vital Lesson With Puss In Boots 2 – And We’re Starting To See Its Impact

Animation has never been more in dangerAI’s replacement animators threat, studio consolidation of scrap projects, as large bosses do not transmit from medium or studios directly by closing all internal productions.

What the animation studios are still in production focuses on everything: Franchise. It is as if the live IP whispering is not enough, Disney, Warner Bros., like Dreamworks, such as Disney, large animation studios are individually focused on growing IP, a sequel after the sequel (occasionally original story here and delicious). Of course, this is not automatically a bad thing. Take DreamWorks, unquestionably the master of animated trilogies (“How to train the dragon”, “Madagascar” and “Kung Fu Panda” are all excellent) and who were delivered in 2022 One of the best animated films of the decade “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”.

Since then, DreamWorks has been delivering weak sequels to successful films such as “Trolls Band together” and disappointing “Kung Fu Panda 4th” It seems to change with the upcoming “The Bad Guy 2” event, which Dreamworks introduced to the enthusiasm of the crowd at the 2025 Annual Animation Film Festival. This feels like the studio learns the vital lesson “Puss in Boots”, and hopefully there are a sign of things that come to the studio.

Based on the series of the same name of Aaron Blabey, the first “The Bad Guys” was a funny capers who have inspired 70s films, mainly for “Ocean’s 11” children. It featured all the characteristics of the Great Heist movie, such as a cool and memorable crew, a plan that is immediately passed, a fun but exciting complication, a good thug and even a better robbery.

For the sequel, “The Bad Guy 2” is getting bigger and bolder, but not just about pulling another hurry. Instead, director Pierre Perifel and Deputy Director JP Sans talked about how Blabey’s books are fighting different genres (including a sci-fi and thriller), so they wanted to do the same and push the story into a new place. This time it’s a less Hist movie and more of the Earth’s adventure movie like “Mission: Impossible”, “James Bond” or even “Fast and Furious”. There is a throw there, but the sets are bigger and more detailed, the scope of the activity is expanding, and unlike Vin Diesel and company, the bad boys do not take nine films into space.

Annecy’s audience had the essence of the whole story in the form of several 5-10 minute clips, and it is clear that the film is trying to do something different from its predecessor. The film begins with a robbery in a rich guy’s mansion somewhere in the nearby Earth and eventually turns into a fight to prevent the spacecraft from hijacking. It is a wild escape case from the first movie, and something that “Puss in Boots 2” did great.

What made the “Boots in the bag: the last wish” So good was how different it felt like its predecessor. Compared to other sequences, such as “Shrek 2” or “Madagascar 2”, which retained much of the appearance of their first films, “Last wish” was a wild departure. The art style was much more stylized and anime-inspiration. The story, although it was still in the same fairy-tale world, was both a “funny” race “type of competition to find a magical object, as well as a miserable, nuanced story of mortality and aging. It was a very personal story for Antonio Banderas, who gave a great performance.

Of course, The movie became a huge hit and Oscar candidate. “The Bad Guy 2”, even though it follows the visual model of the first movie (even though it pushes its live action movie with stunning anamorphic lenses combined with anime-type graphic style) doing something similar to how much of the album is from the first movie. Advanced that every DreamWorks sequel does not have to do this exact thing, but it is the principle of trying sequels and exploring something really unique, making the 30-year-old studio exciting.