Fantastic Movie. Philosophical, Inspiring, Funny

Rating: 9/10 (29 December 2011)

This movie is entertaining and well thought out in many levels. In the most reductive form, its the story of a Panda(an unfit animal for training Kung Fu?) who wants to be a Kung Fu fighter. The movie is about how he eventually gets there, and that he does against many odds in a very entertaining way. That is the inspiring part of the story.
If you look a little bit more deeply, we see that the 5 animals that are currently training to be the dragon warrior are monkey, crane, tiger, snake and mantis. They are not chosen by co-incidence, but these are the famous five animal fighting styles taught in Kung Fu.
When the funny panda goofs up and unwittingly puts himself in a spot where he gets picked for the dragon warrior, master Shifu is not thrilled, and he does not believe that the panda can be a dragon warrior, and he is determined to make the panda give up and leave. But wise Oogway has faith in his selection. Eventually, master Shifu has to accept the fact that he has to train the panda to be a dragon warrior and in that process Shifu has to relearn his teaching methods as well.
After intense training the panda has proved he is worthy and gets to open the dragon scroll, and here is where it reaches a philosophical zenith. When he opens the dragon scroll, he is supposed to see something special that is supposed to give him an advantage over his enemy, and what he sees is an empty scroll with a reflection of his face! The message indirectly conveyed is to have faith in oneself or, that if you truly believe in yourself you could be special, i.e you could achieve the impossible! Panda learns this(the meaning of the scroll) only later when he tries to find out what makes his dad's soup so special!
Everybody else (furious five and Shifu), see the scroll as well, but however, it was only the panda who figures out what the empty scroll means. He tries to explain to Tai-Lung as to what the meaning of the scroll is, Tai-Lung does not see the meaning and thinks he is being tricked which eventually leads to his own destruction!
Some of the core philosophy behind Kung Fu, is drawn from Buddhism. I cant help drawing a parallel between a famous saying originating from Buddhism- it says "Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry water." The difference is only in the frame of mind. Analogous to that, even here after seeing the dragon scroll, panda only had to change its frame of mind to be special.