How Old Is Puss in Boots?

It’s hard to determine a character’s age when living in a world filled with magic where characters can be immortal or never age. Take, for example, Shrek; how do you determine how long an ogre can live and their average lifespan? Luckily, Puss is a cat, so we do have some real-world knowledge we can use to determine his approximate age. How old is Puss in Boots?

Puss in Boots in 20.5 years old in cat years in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. In the first movie, he is eight and a half years old and remains after he first meets Shrek in the 2nd Shrek movie. After the end of their adventures, Puss is 13 years old.

If you’re curious to see how exactly Puss is 20.5 years old and want to see references to scenes from both movies that determine his age, stick around to see the logic behind it.

Theories before Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Puss is a dramatic cat, so when he speaks about past experiences, it’s hard to say whether or not he’s talking about events that happened ten years ago or a month ago. Such behavior can be seen in the scene from the first movie where he and Humpty Alexander Dumpty first meet after years apart. In the scene, Puss leaves and, after a bit of ”convincing” tells the story of how Humpty betrayed him.

Luckily, Humpty says something relevant to help us determine Puss’s age. Specifically, he says, ”it’s been seven years, that’s like 35 cat years,” which means Puss is at least seven years old. But he’s not. In the flashback of his betrayal, we see Puss is still a kitten who doesn’t speak, only meows.

In real life, cats usually sexually mature at six months, so we can assume that he was six months old when he first started talking. He was still small and had some growing up to do. On average, cats stop growing at 12 months, but some keep growing until they’re 18 months old. We won’t give Puss the benefit of the doubt since he was so small at six months old, and we’ll assume that he fully grew when he was 18 months old. That would mean that Puss is eight and a half years old during the first movie.

A look at Imelda

Imelda is Puss’s and Humpty’s foster mom, but why is she relevant in determining how old Puss is? In the movie, she first appears in the flashback when she adopted Puss. Later, we see her again near the movie’s end but in the present time. Imelda hasn’t aged, which checks out our guess that Puss is at least eight years old because she wouldn’t be able to age a lot during that period.

Theories after Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish changes everything we know about Puss, his life, and how old he is. In The Last Wish, it is confirmed that cats indeed have nine lives, which makes counting how old Puss is a bit more difficult, but we’ll try our best to determine how old Puss is.

So, Puss already dies eight times and is down to his last of the nine lives. Once, he got run over by a bull; another time, he fell from too high of a place while drunk; once, he burnt to a crisp because he set the oven too high; and once, he was a bodybuilder and a bar with weights on it fell on him.

I won’t mention all the ways in which Puss lost his life, but the most important one is the one with the Ginger Man. Puss met Ginger Man while he was out on adventures with his friends from Far Far Away, Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, and the gang. All that’s left to do now is to determine whether the Shrek storyline canonically happens after the first Puss in Boots movie or before it.

Puss in Boots from 2011 is a prequel to the Shrek series, so it all happened before Puss in Boots ever met the gang. They officially meet when Puss in Boots is hired to slay Shrek in the 2nd movie. Luckily, someone made the whole timeline of the movie so we can easily determine how long before Shrek and Puss meet after he clears his name in his hometown.

According to the Tumblr post, Puss was framed in 1128 and cleared his name seven years later, according to Humpty, which means he cleared it in 1135. In the same year, he becomes an ogre slayer and is hired by Harold to slay Shrek. They quickly become friends and remain friends throughout each of the remaining movies. In the year 1139, Shrek’s adventures end. This makes Puss 13 years old at the end of the 4th movie.

The final answer

We can’t exactly determine how old Puss was each time he died in the movie, but we can consider that his death with the Ginger Man happened when he was still adventuring with Shrek. If that was his 5th life wasted and he was on his 6th, and we took an average of the five lives already wasted, it means he lived each of his five lives for 2.5 years. If we transfer this logic to the remaining 3, Puss, at the time of The Last Wish, is 20.5 years old in cat years. In human years, Puss is 98 years old.

Do his looks and age reset after dying?

Puss, after each death, has all of the memories of his past life, and if memories are what makes a life, then no, his age doesn’t reset, and his looks don’t either, as shown by the scene where he dies and comes back to life looking like his regular old self.