Puss in Boots

"Puss in Boots" (Der gestiefelte Kater; Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté; Il gatto con gli stivali; De Gelaarsde Kat) is a European fairy tale about an anthropomorphic cat who uses trickery and deceit to gain power, wealth, and the hand in marriage of a princess for his penniless and low-born master.

The oldest written telling version Costantino Fortunato (Italian for "Lucky Costantino") by Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola, included in The Facetious Nights of Straparola (c. 1550–1553), in which the cat is a fairy in disguise who helps his owner, a poor boy named Costantino, to gain his princess by duping a king, a lord and many commoners. There is a version written by Girolamo Morlini, from whom Straparola used various tales in The Facetious Nights; another version was published in 1634 by Giambattista Basile with the title Cagliuso. The most popular version of the tale was written in French at the close of the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a retired civil servant and member of the Académie française.

Puss in Boots appears in DreamWorks' Shrek franchise, appearing in all three sequels to the original film, as well as two spin-off films, Puss in Boots (2011) and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), where he is voiced by Antonio Banderas. The character is signified in the logo of Japanese anime studio Toei Animation, and is also a popular pantomime in the UK.

Tale type
In folkloristics, Puss in Boots is classified as Aarne–Thompson–Uther ATU 545B, "Puss in Boots", a subtype of ATU 545, "The Cat as Helper". Folklorists Joseph Jacobs and Stith Thompson point that the Perrault tale is the possible source of the Cat Helper story in later European folkloric traditions. Similarly, Frisian professor Jurjen van der Kooi noted that variants from oral tradition were only starting to be recorded from the 19th century onwards, and tales from Central and Western Europe follow Perrault's and Grimm's redaction very closely.

The animal helper
According to scholars (e.g., van der Kooi, Hans-Jörg Uther, Stith Thompson and Ines Köhler-Zülch), while the cat appears mostly in Europe as the animal helper, variants across cultures replace the cat with a jackal, a fox or another species of animal,   like a dog, a rooster, or an ape. German folklorist Köhler-Zulch noted the geographical distribution of the different animal helpers: a fox in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as well in the Caucasus and Central Asia; and an ape, a jackal or a gazelle in Southern Asia and in Africa. For instance, professor Damiana Eugenio remarked that the helpful animal is a monkey "in all Philippine variants".

In the Hungarian National Catalogue of Folktales (MNK), in tale type 545B, A csizmás kandúr ("The (Tom)cat with boots"), the protagonist may be helped either by a cat or a rooster received from his father as his inheritance, or rescues a fox from peril (e.g., starvation or hunters), and the animal promises to help him in return.

According to Swedish scholar Waldemar Liungman, a cycle of tales that developed in Northern Europe involves the spirit of a dead man instead of a cat. This cycle is found in Denmark, Finland and Estonia.

The fox helper
According to the description of the tale type in the East Slavic Folktale Catalogue (СУС), last updated by scholar Lev Barag in 1979, the hero may be helped either by a cat (кот), or by a fox (лиса). Similarly, the Bulgarian Folktale Catalogue names type 545B as Воденичарят и лисицата ("The Miller and the Fox").

In the Typen türkischer Volksmärchen ("Turkish Folktale Catalogue"), by Wolfram Eberhard and Pertev Naili Boratav, both scholars listed the variants with the fox as the animal helper under Turkish type TTV 34, Der Müller und der Fuchs ("The Miller and the Fox"), which corresponds in the international classification to tale type ATU 545B.

Hungarian orientalist László L. Lőrincz established the classification of the Mongolian tale corpus. In his system, the story appears as type 32, Der Dank des schlauen roten Fuchs ("The grateful, sly red fox"), in two variations: the fox replaces the cat as the protagonist's helper; the protagonist either hunts the fox himself and releases it (variation "A"), or he hides the fox from a hunter (variation "B"); in return, the red fox helps the protagonist marry a khan's daughter.

Tales of the Caucasian Region also register the fox in the place of the cat. For example, Georgian scholarship registers tale type ATU 545B in Georgia, with the name "The Fox and the Peasant", wherein the cat is replaced by the helpful fox. Similarly, in the index of Adyghe folktale corpus, a fox helps a poor carpenter to marry the daughter of a knyaz (lord).

Distribution
The tale has also spread to the Americas, and is known in Asia (India, Indonesia and Philippines). Greek scholar Marianthi Kaplanoglou states that the tale type ATU 545B, "Puss in Boots" (or, locally, "The Helpful Fox"), is an "example" of "widely known stories (...) in the repertoires of Greek refugees from Asia Minor".

Adaptations
The saying "enough to make a cat laugh" dates from the mid-1800s and is associated with the tale of Puss in Boots.

The Bibliothèque de Carabas book series was published by David Nutt in London in the late 19th century, in which the front cover of each volume depicts Puss in Boots reading a book.