La véritable histoire du Chat Botté

There are elements to this movie that are very pretty. Many of the visuals are stunning, excellently deep textures throughout. The characters by and large good but their movements can be very strange at times.

The real problem is the murkiness of the story. A narrator would have been an excellent improvement. Without an internal monologue or narration the cat seems to be crazier than you would guess. The setting is perplexing with random elements from Spanish, Middle Eastern, and French styling with no clear rhyme or reason. Also for no clear reason a school of ghost fish come to life near the end. yep.

The voice acting was also painful. Namely Shatner's cat voice is something to truly despise. The monkey is Jamaican? Most disappointingly is that they didn't get a quality singer for the princess.

This last point sticks out because there was a lot of music in this movie. It has a charming American Indie vibe including stripped down percussion and on occasion a ukulele. But her voice fails to be either traditional or suitably indie.

Also the Ogre is inexorably dumb and useless as a villain.

This film is not fit for the American viewing audience...(pause while I vomit....regain my composure). What am I hearing?...a middle schooler's impersonation of a crazy grandmother? No, that's William Shatner trying to disguise Captain Kirk's voice. Let's not compare this to other movies with cats that wear boots. Let's judge it on it's own merits. For starters, never dub a movie. Not even a cartoon. It is horrifying to watch lips that don't match the audio. Subtitles would have been more bearable. Secondly, the plot is so boring my wife has banned my Red Box privileges. To watch paint dry is more entertaining than this film.

Claims that this is trying to cash in on the Shrek movie may be true, we thought that was what we were renting. Still, when we realized, we were not disappointed and were willing to give it a try...

Only to be severely disappointed. The story is not compelling, the characters are unsympathetic and ugly in both visage and voice. The animation is weak and odd (and not in the cool good way). We waited for it to get better but it just trundled along in mediocrity. I fell asleep somewhere a little after halfway despite giving it my best. The survivors reported it was as bad through to the end.

I was intrigued to find out it is from France as it did have that vibe that used to come from several foreign-produced cartoons when I was younger (Dogtanion, around the world in 80 days etc). I think it's the way they try and cram the English language into French-animated mouths. Indeed, this may have succeeded more as a traditional cartoon, possibly a series.

To sum up, not worth watching. Go track down the Christopher Walken live-action version. I stumbled on it by accident one day and ended up watching it all the way through, spellbound.

I'm sure my impression of it would have been much better had I listened to it in the original French. But William Shatner was a horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE choice for the voice of the English version. His raspy, shaky voice and constant non-verbal noises he kept making just utterly ruined it. In the prior release, for English-speaking audiences, I suppose we were spoiled by Antonio Bandaras' as the cat. Shatner's Puss was just plain nails-on-chalkboard awful. Totally ruined any potential enjoyment I might have been able to get out of it. The story itself was okay, though definitely a bit on the "silly" side - but it doesn't seem to be geared towards an adult audience, so that's okay.

I can't really comment on the French version, though surely they had to have a better voice than Shatner. If you're listening to it in English, just don't expect an experience even remotely similar to the original movie release. This movie was nothing like it. At. All.

This film is dreadful. I had rented a copy of the movie "The True story of Puss 'n Boots" because I thought it was by the same people who did the Shrek movies; the Puss on the DVD cover looked just like the one in Shrek. Instead, it was a horrible, badly animated regurgitation of the fairytale that looks like it was done in Belgium and is over-dubbed in English. It supposedly contains voice-overs by William Shatner, but you can find him among the other noise in the dialog. And many of the characters are just plain ugly: the drunken queen, the obese king, and the Fright-Night-Evil-Clown of a chamberlain may play overseas, but here in the US they're just awful in what is supposed to be a film for children. It was such an ugly, boring mess I turned it off after about 10 minutes. The Shrek people should sue these folk for false advertising, and anyone who rents this should be aware that it's NOT what it pretends to be.