It’s been 13 years since the last time I set foot in the Shrek extended universe, with Shrek Forever After, a movie I barely remember even after digging up the review to jog my memory. Nothing about the green-ogre franchise ever appealed to me — not the annoying Mike Myers ogre voice, not the coarse humor and the literal ugliness, not the awful cynical knowingness that pervaded its sending up of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault and (above all) Walt Disney. So the fact that the franchise seemed to go extinct after the 2012 spin-off Puss in Boots was entirely fine with me — a rare case of a piece of high-profile movie-industry IP actually being allowed to simply die.

But this is modern Hollywood, where what is dead may never die, so somehow more than a decade onward we have a Puss in Boots sequel, putting the louche feline brigand (with the louche feline voice of Antonio Banderas) back into action — sword, whiskers, boots, and all. A sequel to a little-remembered spin-off sounds like barrel-scraping, but it turns out that this is exactly what the people wanted — Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a major theatrical hit. And not only with the masses: The critics like it, other parents like it, it has good vibes on a scale I haven’t seen for a kids’-movie sequel since Paddington 2.

The vibes aren’t wrong: It’s pretty good. I can’t go further than that “pretty,” because even without Shrek himself, my bias against the ogreverse endures: I don’t think our culture needs snide, overly adult send-ups of fairy tales, and if we needed one or two we definitely don’t need five or six. And the new Puss in Boots still operates in that territory — it’s got a megalomaniacal Big Jack Horner, Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a cockney-accented crime family, some litterbox humor, and jokes that require a bleeping out, all stapled to a plot that’s basically just a video-game adventure or a cut-rate Dungeons & Dragons quest.

But given those liabilities, the movie also has a lot of assets. First, it looks great in a way that the Shrek antecedents never did: It’s much more painterly, with colors that pop and sequences that use hand-drawn elements and stylized action, recovering a little bit of the illustrated style of animation’s golden past after so many years of computer-generated pseudo-realism.

Second, it makes the most of its voice actors, giving them good lines and letting them chew on them in heavy, silly accents. The list includes not only Banderas and Salma Hayek — back as Kitty Softpaws, Puss’s love interest — but also Florence Pugh as Goldilocks, Ray Winstone and Olivia Colman as Papa and Mama Bear, Da’Vine Joy Randolph as a cat lady who takes Puss into her feline sanctuary, and especially the cheery deadpan of John Mulaney as Horner, a perfect fit for a pie-snarfing nursery-rhyme character grown into a fat-cheeked sociopath.

Third, it finds something that both justifies Puss’s pursuit of the movie’s MacGuffin — a fallen star in an enchanted forest that has a single wish to offer anyone who finds it — and gives him a more frightening opponent than just the rival characters chasing it, Horner and Goldilocks and her bears. This is the news, delivered early in the movie, that the feline bandit has recklessly used up eight of his nine lives, which is followed up by the appearance of the Wolf (Wagner Moura), seemingly a bounty hunter but in fact none other than Death himself, armed and dangerous and ready to take life No. 9.

The pursuit of the star’s wish thus becomes a kind of fountain-of-youth exercise, with Puss hoping to reboot his nine lives, shake off both the fear of death and the literal Grim Reaper, and restore himself to carefree-bandito status. Except, of course, that the afraid-of-death version of himself is actually the better one: He’s a better man for Kitty, a surprisingly good friend to the tiny dog Perrito (Harvey Guillén) whom he picks up as a sidekick, and generally less insufferable and cocksure. So the movie becomes a meditation on the moral uses of mortality, even a tacit critique of the entire sequels-and-blockbusters business in which its story is embedded, with their sequels and reboots and multiverses ex machina keeping characters alive long past what would be natural for a traditional narrative arc, a good life.

Until, that is, the very very end, when the requirements of the industry send our feline hero sailing off not into the sunset but in the direction of Far Far Away, the kingdom of the green ogre — teasing a sequel beyond this sequel, a reboot of the larger Shrek-i-verse. This sequel’s journey was worth taking; for that one, count me out.