El gato con botas

Constantly bombarded at this film are turkey awards for bad costuming and poor dubbing. As we all know, poor dubbing is not the filmmaker's fault, because this film was made to be seen in Spanish. To find heavy fault with the costumes is to ignore the films strong merits as an excellent satire. I find this film reminiscent of Jean Renoir's _The Golden Coach_. This is because the film relocates the story from France to eighteenth-century Mexico, which is not merely a plot contrivance to fit with the setting, is an essential element to this version of the story, much like in Renoir's film, dealing with imperialism outside the main plot. The king is a very caucasian-looking Spanish lord, and the division between the wealthy Spaniards and the poor Mexicans is quite strong. To its credit, however, the film does not take sides, but rather makes mock-worthy characters on both sides, and allows the camera to linger on little details that develop the characters, extending most of the scenes slightly longer than they would be in a high concept American film. The film's ordeal with the talking chicken is a particularly notewothy hegemonic attack masquerading as a children's entertainment. New elements such as this, not created by Perrault, are skillfully integrated into the whole of the film, and it is quite a taut, comic masterpiece. If only they had spent more on the costuming, though the special effect of Puss running on sped-up film was a charming effect, even if it most likely was done to save money. A literate script, fine acting, lavish score, and effective camerawork allow me to forgive the shabby costumes. I only wish I had a subtitled version, so as not to contend with the atrociously inept dubbing, courtesy of kiddie exploitationer K. Gordon Murray. This is probably the film version of the story most worth seeing, because it innovates the story to its own agenda, rather than trying to be a literal adaptation of the story, of which there are plenty.