Awesome? Well... almost.

Rating: 7/10 (19 June 2011)

Having watched "Kung Fu Panda (KFP-1)" so many times and having fallen in love with those characters and humor again and again, the expectations were just so high for "Kung Fu Panda 2 (KFP-2)" when I watched it, and which it slightly fell short of. The IMDb ratings don't tell the real story. Ratings are high because the movie was visually spectacular. Agreed. Awesomenss in 3D! But as a movie, is it watchable as many times as the first part? And that, time can only tell.
KFP-1 was constantly hilarious and it was just nonstop fun. The villain "Tai-Lung" was ferociously special. KFP2 is a different breed. It touches various other aspects of life like - pain, sacrifice, vengeance, inner-peace... The villain "Lord Shen" is cunningly evil. So this movie, in a way, is more mature than the former, but not as flamboyantly hilarious.
One of the strong points of KFP-2, is the way it deals with the emotions. The sensitivity of relationships between Po (Panda) and his father (Duck), his friends - the furious five, especially Tigress, is dealt superbly well. Parts of the movie involving 'Po' as a baby, are very cute and touching. The sequence where 'Po' finds his inner-peace almost got me crying, and when he uses the same technique in the climax fight, that gave me goose-bumps. That was AWESOME!
DreamWorks has done a great job. Awesome graphics, action sequences, characterization, good humor, but not so awesome plot. Plot is not bad but small, which makes you feel the movie is short. It has lot of fights alright, which are mostly amusing so the movie never gets boring. But one of the weak points of the movie, I felt, are some of the dialogs of Po (Jack Black), which sounded half-baked to me, and could have been a lot more refined and funnier than they actually were. They probably were way too slapstick for my liking. But funny nevertheless. And forget not the voices of Shen (Gary Oldman) and Tigress (Angelina Jolie) in this movie. Fantastic!
All in all, it's an almost AWESOME movie which had the potential to be utterly AWESOME.