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CNN
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One of the most stirring and resonant sequences in a film this awards season comes from an unlikely source: “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.”

The DreamWorks film, a sequel to a spinoff of “Shrek,” follows the titular feline as he attempts to restore eight of the nine lives he’s spent. He spends most of the film committing acts of daring with panache and charm to spare, as audiences have come to expect from Puss in Boots.

But during one crucial sequence, Puss loses faith, and panic and fear threaten to consume him.

Puss slumps against a tree in a forest, huffing and puffing. His rapid heartbeat drowns out any other sound in the forest where he lies. His friend, the affable therapy dog Perrito, notices Puss is in distress and lays his head on our feline hero’s tummy. Puss exhales a few times, calmly pets Perrito and is able to recover.

It’s a quiet, brief moment in an otherwise jovial film aimed at young viewers and families. But it’s resonating with many viewers for its depiction of what it feels like to have a panic attack – and the relief of coming out the other side.

“That was one of our big goals – let’s take our audience on a journey that expresses the full range of emotions of life,” said Joel Crawford, director of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” in an interview with CNN.

There are still hard-won victories, gags and hard-earned wisdom in the film, but what lends “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” its staying power is its heart and honesty, even in a fairy-tale setting. Psychologists spoke with CNN about why it can be impactful to see panic attacks reflected on screen – and how a bipedal, sword-carrying cat got it right.

A panic attack is “basically a wave of powerful, physical fear that feels overwhelming,” said David Carbonell, a clinical psychologist based in Chicago who specializes in fear and phobias. Someone experiencing a panic attack may feel their heart beating at a faster-than-normal rate and have trouble catching their breath. Lightheadedness and tingles in extremities are common, too. But the throughline is always fear that feels suffocating, even if that fear doesn’t match one’s circumstances.

Lynn Bufka, associate chief of practice transformation at the American Psychological Association and a clinician, compared a panic attack to an encounter in the desert with a terrifying rattlesnake. Faced with a venomous foe, our body would trigger a physiological response to the fear in front of us. But with a panic attack, there usually isn’t an obvious cause, and this unknown element can make a panic attack feel even scarier, she said.

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” takes place in the same fairy-tale land of the “Shrek” series, with its anthropomorphic animals and ogres with hearts of gold. The new film features Goldilocks and the three bears, a grown-up and villainous version of “Little Jack Horner” of nursery rhyme fame and Salma Hayek as a feline foil to Antonio Banderas’ Puss in Boots. All of them are after a mythical wishing star, which, if Puss can reach it first, could restore the first eight of his nine lives.

It’s all very fantastical and humorous until it isn’t. In a brief but crucial sequence, Puss is overwhelmed by fear and can’t catch his breath. Even his comedic sidekick Perrito straightens up to calmly comfort Puss. It’s a sober moment in an otherwise jovial story.

That was intentional, director Crawford said. He told CNN that the moment wasn’t for laughs, and the film as a whole aimed to portray a more vulnerable side to the swashbuckling cat audiences have come to know.

“(Watching) an animated world is such a great way to escape,” he said, while noting that challenging topics can be explored through the comfort of fiction.

The process began with the film’s screenwriters, Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow, who brought their own experiences to the film’s portrayal of fear and panic, as well as Crawford and co-director Januel Mercado. Then it moved to storyboard artist Taylor Meacham, who drew from his own panic attacks to sketch what Puss might look like. Everything from the “tunnel vision” when viewers see Puss’ point of view to the loud heartbeat that takes over the scene were pulled from his experiences with panic, Meacham told CNN.

He also made sure the scene slowed down to take the time “needed for Puss in Boots to relax and breathe as he comes out of his attack,” he said. “The contrast from such intensity gradually into calm is another moment I hope feels real for viewers.”

Animator Prashanth Cavale even filmed himself as a reference for the scene, adding “tiny clenches and twitches” to add a lifelike texture to the scene, Cavale told CNN.

The goal, Crawford said, was to avoid making the moment feel “superficial or forced” while keeping it accessible to viewers of all ages.

“Fear, weakness, anxiety – if anybody has ever felt those emotions, which is everybody, we wanted to make sure this scene related to them,” Crawford said.

What audiences see in “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is less what a panic attack looks like to a bystander and more what it feels like to have one. A panic attack is often imperceptible to everyone except the person experiencing them, Bufka and Carbonell said. But in the moment, a panic attack can feel like a catastrophic event, even if it doesn’t look like one on the outside.

“Puss in Boots” isn’t the first example of popular media to feature a character experiencing a panic attack. Tony Soprano infamously suffered from them in “The Sopranos,” though his were greatly exaggerated and unrealistic – it’s rare for people to collapse during or after a panic attack, Carbonell said. The new HBO Max series “Velma” takes a heightened approach to panic attacks, too, showing both its bespectacled protagonist’s exaggerated perspective of panic and the subdued reality. (HBO and CNN share parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.)

Former ABC News journalist Dan Harris even had a panic attack live on air while reading a brief news item, though most coworkers and viewers didn’t know it at the time thanks to his outwardly calm demeanor.

Even if a panic attack portrayed onscreen isn’t a universal representation of the psychological phenomenon, seeing a character have one, particularly in a film like “Puss in Boots” that children and adults alike will view, can lead someone to consider their own experiences with panic and anxiety and seek help from an expert or from loved ones, Bufka said.

“It just really helps to normalize that this happens, and that you can recover,” she said.

When Puss finds comfort in his friend, the portly Perrito, who lends a paw for support without saying anything, the dog’s response is a fine example for people to follow if they know their loved ones have panic attacks, Carbonell said.

“You want to undercut the panic and bring it back down to reasonable proportions,” Carbonell said. Simply being there for someone and not overwhelming them with suggestions can help ground them.

Puss also accepts the help Perrito silently offers him. Fighting against a panic attack, Carbonell said, can often elongate and worsen it – the “quicksand of mental illness.” But letting it pass and rediscovering one’s calm is often the quickest way to get through it, he said.

For children, especially, seeing a character feel extreme fear and then find comfort in a loved one can be impactful, Bufka said, even if they’re not familiar with the term “panic attack.”

“People don’t always have the language for their emotions,” she said. “But it’s important to have it onscreen, because it helps people feel seen, recognized and not alone.”

A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

CNN
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To pry open the mysteries of our planet’s past, scientists typically study rocks and fossilized bones.

Eggs are an often overlooked but extremely rich source of information, with birds, reptiles, dinosaurs and a few oddball mammals laying them on land for more than 200 million years.

Rare fossilized eggshells can illuminate the behavior and diet of ancient creatures, expose changes in climate, and shed light on how our prehistoric relatives lived and communicated.

And now, an “eggciting” discovery in India announced this week has revealed intimate details about the lives of some of the biggest dinosaurs to walk the Earth.

Paleontologists in central India have unearthed a fossilized dinosaur hatchery with 92 nests and 256 eggs belonging to colonies of giant plant-eating titanosaurs.

Judging by the nests’ proximity to one another, researchers inferred the dinosaurs laid eggs together in colonies or rookeries, as many birds do today.

However, unlike most bird species, titanosaurs weren’t doting parents. Researchers think these creatures likely laid their eggs and then left their offspring to fend for themselves.

“Since titanosaurs were huge in size, closely spaced nests would not have allowed them to visit the nests to maneuver and incubate the eggs or feed the hatchlings … as the parents would step on the eggs and trample them,” said lead study author Guntupalli Prasad, a paleontologist at the University of Delhi.

Planting a tree is a fitting memorial to a loved one, but how about “becoming” a tree after death?

Transcend, a New York-based green burial start-up, is one company offering a way for people to make a positive environmental impact when they shuffle off this mortal coil.

Customers will select a tree species to be planted over the body, which will be prepared with biodegradable flax linen and buried with wood chips, local soil and fungi to facilitate composting. The site is marked, and the tree left to grow.

Advocates hope green burials can help slow the climate crisis, but the industry is new — Transcend hasn’t planted any people yet — and there is little research on how much better human composting is for the environment compared with traditional burials.

Want more ideas on how to tackle the climate crisis and reduce your eco-anxiety? Sign up for CNN’s Life, But Greener limited newsletter series.

Australia’s echidna, like the platypus, belongs to an odd group of mammals that lay eggs, known as monotremes. But the spiky creature’s egg-laying ability isn’t its only unusual characteristic.

Despite being one of the world’s oldest surviving species, echidnas are also thought to be sensitive to heat. Researchers, however, have discovered the echidna uses a unique method to cool down and stay active at much higher temperatures than previously known.

Infrared footage of 124 echidnas shot over the space of a year revealed how they beat the heat of global warming: The creature blows mucus bubbles, which burst over its nose tip and wet it. As the moisture evaporates, it cools the echidna’s blood, with the nose tip acting as an “evaporative window.”

When the Artemis I mission lifted off in November, NASA’s Space Launch System performed as advertised. The most powerful rocket ever flown provided the propulsion needed to send the Orion spacecraft on a journey around the moon and back.

But SLS has long been considered controversial, and NASA and Boeing, which was responsible for the rocket’s core stage, have both received criticism for delays and whopping price tags.

The complicated history of SLS has left some industry insiders with conflicting feelings about the rocket and its place in the Artemis program, which is designed to land humans on the moon and eventually reach Mars.

Meanwhile, astronomers have now documented the cosmic drama that is the Milky Way in unprecedented detail during the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey — and it produced a breathtaking image.

Runes are the oldest known form of writing in Scandinavia and are closely associated with the Viking Age between 793 and 1066 — a time from which thousands of stones with runic inscriptions have been found.

Older runestones are much rarer, and archaeologists in Norway have recently discovered the most ancient known example — thought to be around 2,000 years old.

Researchers at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History spotted the stone while investigating a burial ground in the municipality of Hole in eastern Norway in 2021.

Eight runes on the front face of the reddish-brown sandstone boulder spell “idiberug” when converted into Roman letters. According to one of the archaeologists, it could be the name of a woman.

Immerse yourself in these engrossing stories:

— Scientists have discovered a foot-long snake in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It shares a key trait with its much larger cousin — the boa constrictor.

— NASA and Boeing are teaming up to design a new type of emission-reducing, single-aisle aircraft. Air travelers could benefit in the 2030s.

— Analysis of DNA extracted from the skeletal remains of more than 100 individuals has revealed that, in ancient Greece, marrying your cousin was not just allowed — but encouraged.