OK, I admit it, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is pretty great

A few years back, I was gloating because I believed that Illumination, the studio that came up with the annoying Minions, had got their hands on Disney's angriest competitor DreamWorks. It seems the reality is more complicated: the two animation studios now have the same parent company, but they remain separate. So, spoke too soon, and too uninformedly. What's more, any input DreamWorks may have got from Illumination doesn't seem to have harmed them in the least, quite the contrary.

I really didn't expect to like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish for a number of reasons. One, it's the sequel to a spinoff which was quite decent but didn't beg to be followed up. Two, it is, albeit tangentially, part of the Shrek franchise, which is the main reason I have a lingering scepticism towards DreamWorks in the first place, in spite of really enjoying many of their films. The Shrek films' ambition to "deconstruct fairy tales" is so clearly aimed at the Disney versions of said tales that it becomes embarrassing, and there's a mean streak running through them that I know many people appreciate but I kinda hate. 

Three, the theme of The Last Wish, as praised by a number of critics online, didn't seem to be ideally suited for a family film. It appeared to centre to an alarming degree on confronting and accepting your mortality. That may be an interesting topic for grown-up critics, but what about the kids, a not unimportant target audience? If anyone should be allowed to not to have the inevitability of death rubbed in their faces, surely it should be children.

But, I have to admit defeat. I was won over. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is vivaciously animated, cleverly plotted, and has engaging characters. Yes, the "value your life" message is in there, but it's not what everything's about. Puss isn't the only one who may come to realise that he already has what he needs, "no magic required". The last wish of a fallen star, which he and many others seek, becomes a useful MacGuffin in order to highlight this theme. The way the map to the star changes, and the terrain and its challenges with it, depending on who uses it, was a great detail, inventive and unironically fairy-taleish.

The villains are also particularly strong. There's the dead-serious one (literally), a scary wolf in a hood, armed with two sickles, whom Puss meets in a tavern while drowning his sorrows in cream when he's found out he's on the last of his nine lives. Puss thinks he's a bounty hunter at first. He's not.

Then there's the potentially redeemable antagonist Goldilocks and her bears, a band of small-time crooks (as signalled by their far-from-posh English accents). I really liked the take on the Goldilocks story here: in this version, the bears adopt the orphan girl, fondly imagining that she's part of their family now. Goldi is not so sure.

Lastly, there's a more traditional Shrek-type villain, Big Jack Horner, who is Little Jack Horner grown up to a far from good boy. He's traditional in that he is a comic villain, but also (as the best ones of the Shrek villain bunch) a lethal and ruthless one. The big difference to the Shrek films is that the protagonists respect him and take him seriously. "Oh no, not Jack Horner" Puss exclaims in dismay when he learns who has the map. "That's why you don't mess with Jack Horner", Puss's sometime partner and love interest Kitty comments later, grimly. This approach makes the comic elements of Horner funnier than if he'd been the endless butt of Shrek jokes. At the same time, the cats are right to fear him.

Jack Horner also serves a useful purpose as a dark-humour-magnet. There are Shrek-type jokes of the too-harsh-for-a-Disney-flick kind in this film, but as they're mostly connected to Horner and his actions they're far easier to take than if Puss & Co. had behaved with casual cruelty (as Shrek and Fiona sometimes did). Whether they're heroes or anti-heroes, I prefer protagonists I'm supposed to root for to steer clear of meanness and pettiness. Villains, now, that's a completely different matter.

The one good thing about Disney's Peter Pan & Wendy (to be fair, it's Hook)

You've got to hand it to Peter Pan & Wendy, the live-action Disney remake very few people talk about. It answers the interesting question whether a Peter Pan adaptation with a good Hook can still be bad. The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

There are just too many things that don't work. Neverland doesn't look particularly magical. Peter himself is somewhat muted, and doesn't come across as a charismatic leader. Wendy's never swept away by him; you can certainly allow yourself to have a bit of conflict between Peter and Wendy, but she has to be into him before she starts to question him. I try to disregard the display of modern pieties in light entertainment to some extent, because otherwise I'd have practically no light entertainment to enjoy. But Peter Pan & Wendy parades its 2020s moralism so blatantly that it hurts the story and is impossible to ignore.

For instance, we really don't need a girl quota of "lost boys". J.M. Barrie actually offered an explanation as to why there weren't any lost girls: the lost boys were babies who fell out of their prams, and little girls weren't foolish enough to do that. Which, yes, is a bit patronising, but not more so than a scene where Wendy points out "But you're not all boys", only to be answered with an aggressive "So?" Call them lost children if necessary, but for my money being a lost boy, trailing after Peter Pan and following his orders, isn't that much of a privilege – we needn't covet it. There are still plenty of female characters in Neverland: Wendy, Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, the mermaids (plus, I must reluctantly point out, the crocodile was actually female in the original story). I don't mind a couple of women pirates, though, and a multicultural bunch of lost boys is fine; it's easy to imagine that Peter's recruitment field was wider than the British Isles (and I'm not sure I buy the pram story, seeing how he lured away the Darling siblings).

Speaking of Tinkerbell and Tiger Lily, they are also victims of the filmmakers' good intentions (or moral vanity, take your pick). Tinkerbell can be black, no problem – it was Disney themselves who popularised the blond pigtail look, they're free to change it – but she still has to be recognisably Tinkerbellish: temperamental, jealous of Wendy and sometimes a downright menace. But the film doesn't have the bottle to make an ethnicity-changed Tink a flawed character, so she ends up bland, friendly with Wendy and not noticeably in love with Peter. As for Tiger Lily, I could buy her having big-sisterly feelings for Peter, but otherwise, she's not allowed to have a personality either: she's just wise and, of course, good at fighting.

But, yeah, Jude Law's Hook was good.            

Not that the pirate side of things was flawlessly handled either. The pirates of Neverland aren't meant to resemble any real pirates that ever lived: they're supposed to be the kind of pirates children imagine when they're playing. Having a gritty-looking, greasy-haired Hook instead of the usual glamorous swashbuckler is misunderstanding the source material. For all that, Law plays Hook with an inner melancholy disguised by bravado I think Barrie would have approved of. And I like the sea shanties.

I have some sympathy for the film's attempts to focus on the part of the story I happen to find most fascinating as well: the relationship between Peter Pan and Hook. Here as in so many other versions of the tale, they started out as friends before the friendship went sour. They are also more dependent on each other than they like to admit. When the film revolves around this relationship, I actually found it interesting with even a couple of touching moments.

The problem is that the film is called Peter Pan & Wendy, not Peter Pan & Hook or simply Hook (Spielberg beat Disney to that one). It's supposed to be an adaptation of the classic story, not a left-field take on it. The main plot, though, is told in a perfunctory manner. I can relate to finding Hook's character more intriguing than Peter Pan's, but if that's the way you feel, then maybe you shouldn't do a film based on Barrie's book and play, but rather a prequel or retelling. In the original Peter Pan and Wendy, whatever one may think of Peter Pan, he's very much the hero of his own life.