Foreshadowing / Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

• The film gives many subtle hints about the Wolf's true identity as Death, as in the literal personification of death, and what his intentions are:
  • The numbered cards during the Death Montage have the wolf with his cowl up and his sickles on the four corners. As he points out to Puss, he was there for every one of his deaths, but Puss' disregard of the consequences of dying due to having multiple lives meant he never recognized him when he appeared before him.
  • The doctor reminds Puss that "Death comes for us all". In the very next scene, Death takes the form of the wolf and comes for Puss personally while he's at a bar.
  • He makes his first entrance by suddenly appearing right next to Puss with ghostly silence, hinted at only by a candle nearby Puss blowing out. The doctor who informed Puss he was on his last life similarly blew out a candle to emphasize Puss' mortality.
  • When asking for Puss' autograph on his wanted poster, the Wolf asks him to sign "right here" while tapping the word "Dead" in "Dead or Alive". The noise when he does it is also similar to the sound of a ticking clock, a common metaphor for mortality.
  • There's a reason the Wolf's preferred weapons are a pair of sickles. And he shows up with a cowl. Both are very common imagery relating to the Grim Reaper.
  • Whenever the Wolf prepares his sickles, the camera is often positioned in a manner such that Puss appears enclosed within the blade, emphasizing his goal.
  • When meeting Puss for the first time, the Wolf notes that "Everyone thinks they'll be the one to defeat me. But no one's escaped me yet."
  • When Puss claims he "laughs in the face of Death", the Wolf's claw slightly scratches the poster in what appears to be a momentary flash of anger before he removes his cowl, saying "So I've heard.", hinting that he's Death itself and is not happy with Puss' flippancy towards mortality.
  • When he manages to cut Puss with a blade for the first time in his life, forcing him to recognize his own mortality and how close he came to dying for good, he visibly relishes his opponent's fear and takes sadistic enjoyment out of prolonging Puss's terror. However, as he advances on him, he sarcastically asks the shaken Puss if his life is flashing before his eyes with an expression that mixes contempt with pity in an almost solemn manner. As the Grim Reaper, he knows full well how valuable life is and how most people cherish the one single chance they're given, with Puss recognizing how valuable his was only right as he's about to lose it eliciting a small bit of sympathy for his quarry's foolishness. This also hints as to ultimately how Puss defeats him: not by out-fighting an inexorable a foe as Death, but by recognizing and accepting the value of what life he has remaining, convincing Death to wait for his natural mortal ending instead of reaping him early for his arrogance.
  • When Puss hides from the Wolf behind a locked door, the Wolf's shadow impossibly creeps across the floor, as if the door wasn't there.
  • In Puss' second encounter with him, the Wolf places two stray coins over his eyes as he watches him leave. Ancient Greeks buried their dead with coins over their eyes so they would have money for passage to the Underworld.
  • The Wolf keeps appearing out of thin air with seemingly no one but Puss (initially) able to see him, and during the Travel Montage of the parties heading to the Dark Forest in search of the Star, he is the only one not shown. Furthermore, whereas Goldilocks and the bears track Puss through his scent and Jack Horner tracks him by using a crystal ball, it is never shown how the Wolf manages to find Puss so quickly. As Death is always close to you, he doesn't need to travel to reach his target, nor is his goal the Star.
  • His image or name doesn't appear on the Wishing Star map. At first this, along with the fact that nobody else around Puss seems to react to or acknowledge his presence, seems to imply that his appearances are all in Puss' head after his first traumatic encounter with the fearsome hunter. As the personification of Death itself, it makes sense he wouldn't appear on a map that marks the location of the living within the Dark Forest.
  • The grey stripe on his facial fur is in the shape of a wolf skull, hinting at his sheer danger level and true profession, and when he appears behind Puss at the riverside battle, The surrounding rocks and the white mist that outline him line up in the shape of a skull, hinting as to what he truly is. In fact, given the Dark Forest is affected by the heart of those who hold the map, it's implied that the noticeably-darker and symbolic surroundings around him were Death's presence literally affecting the environment to spell out to Puss what he was.
  • All the major characters are introduced in the film with a "Wanted!" Poster (although Perrito has an Unwanted Poster), with the exception of the Wolf. This is an early hint that the character is more than a simple bounty hunter, because, after all, who goes around wanting Death himself "dead or alive"? An alternate interpretation is that he did have a wanted poster introduction all along—he just used Puss' own poster to do it.
  • During the battle against the Baker's Dozen, when Puss suffers Shell-Shock Silence when a unicorn horn-inflicted explosion of confetti occurs right next to him, he still somehow hears the wolf's whistle clear as day, despite being able to basically hear nothing else. This hints that he's very much tied to something closer to Puss than just physical space.
  • Following from the above, the confetti explosion that occurred before the Wolf's second appearance was the death of a baker minion, courtesy of Jack's poor aim. And in the previous scenes where the Wolf appears, it's either before or after a death has occurred onscreen: for the first, with Puss himself losing his eighth life by being crushed by the bell in the beginning; and for the second, after one of the Serpent Sisters is turned by an annoyed Jack Horner into a golden statue. In the climax, the Wolf arrives at the Wishing Star after the last of Jack's minions dies due to his callousness.
  • There are also several hints about the overall theme of the movie before we meet the Wolf for the first time.
    • The governor's portrait features him holding a skull, a Renaissance motif that was an explicit reference to mortality. We later see that Puss vandalized it with his own face, hinting that Puss will have to grapple with his own mortality at some point.
    • When the governor returns home to see it overrun with peasants, Puss is hanging from a drapery that has twisted around on itself several times. From a distance, it looks like a noose... and it's only compounded by how Puss gets down from the ceiling: cutting through the governor's portrait, that Puss had already vandalized, right through his own face.
    • The wall behind Puss's wanted poster is covered with sword marks, including a group of eight tally marks, one for each of Puss's lives up to that point.
    • The barber-doctor's office is filled with diagrams of skulls and bones and even has a complete articulated skeleton, used to hold Puss's sword while he recuperates from dying, and from which he takes it as he leaves. Combined with the Wolf's "Pick it up" line, this last bit also foreshadows Death's true nature more directly.
• During the fight against the giant at the start of the movie, Puss is flung into a sign with the letters J and H, a thumb with a plum on it and a pie. Put together, they form a reference to the nursery rhyme "Little Jack Horner," the basis for "Big" Jack Horner, who runs a thriving baked goods enterprise (with the possibility of the sign belonging to a store part of said enterprise).
• When Goldi and the Bears break in to Jack Horner's pie factory, Baby crashes through a window and smashes another one that has a vanity portrait of Jack. Then, when the family are all gathered together, they're in front of the same spot where said portrait was broken. This foreshadows how the Bears' next venture would be to take over the pie business after Jack's death, and it was Baby who suggested the idea.
• During the first chase with Jack Horner's henchmen, a flaming arrow shot by one of them nearly sets the Magic Map on fire until Puss and Kitty manage to extinguish the embers. In the climax, the map is ultimately destroyed when the Ethical Bug and the Phoenix burn one of the pieces before Jack can reassemble them.
• Once Goldi gets her hands on the map, several hints are made involving that whatever Goldi is going to wish for, she already has it; namely, her desire for a real family. For instance, during the moment Goldi and the Bears play around, the map glitches (showing that Goldi's wish isn't as concrete as the others), and then only gives her one obstacle: the bears' family home.
• While discussing the Wishing Star with Puss and Perrito, Kitty says that it probably works according to birthday wishes, if you tell them to others, the wish will not get fulfilled. In the end, everyone discussed their wishes to other people, and no one is able to gain a wish from the Wishing Star.
• The town Puss saves from the giant is called Del Mar, implying it's near the ocean. At the end of the movie, the heroes have stolen the governor's ship from Del Mar's docks.
• The town in which Puss and Kitty had their falling out is Santa Coloma, indicating it's a rather religious place. And sure enough, the reason for their falling out did involve a church...

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