Second best animated feature of the year!!

Rating: 8/10 (2 February 2009)

The evolution of the martial arts genre has been of particular interest to me lately, as I recently bought a Bruce Lee collection and have been watching a few of his old classics and comparing them to the newer species of movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Shaolin Soccer. I wasn't all that excited about the switch to zero gravity that we saw in Crouching Tiger, but the impact and the sheer style of Shaolin Soccer was completely unexpected and pretty damned amazing. Also, the Shaolin Temple, where Chinese kung-fu originated, is about a 45-minute drive from where I live in central China. I've been there a couple times and the kung-fu shows that they put on are pretty spectacular.
With that in mind, I was curious to see how kung-fu would be portrayed in a kid's movie, although I should say that I expected something truly goofy with a title like Kung Fu Panda, but I was surprised and relieved that the movie avoided being a childish kickboxing cartoon. True, it's about a Panda that is so fat that he has trouble getting out of bed in the morning, but in the film as a whole, the childish moments, the sort of over-the-top laughs and cartoonish fat jokes were mainly designed to get laughs and, more importantly, create a charming and likable main character.
And it would be foolish to say that the movie doesn't have it's laughs. Jack Black provides the voice of Po, a young Panda entering the last stages of his childhood, where he is beginning to wonder if taking over the tiny noodle shop run by his father Mr. Ping, a stork, is really that future intended for him. They live in the Chinese Valley of Peace under the stately shadow of a temple that towers overhead.
The temple is of vast importance, too, not only historically but as the location where the ceremony to choose the Dragon Warrior will be held. Po has fantasies about becoming the Dragon Warrior, fantasies that seem at once ridiculous and inevitable, given the fact that Kung Fu Panda, for all its strengths, is essentially an underdog story. Unfortunately, Po's job is to keep his head out of the clouds and drag a noodle cart up the endless steps to the mountaintop temple and sell them to the people going to watch the ceremony. He is understandably disheartened and disillusioned.
Po's central challenge is not just to find a way to enter the ceremony and win the Dragon Warrior title, but first to find a way to tell his father that he is not interested in carrying on the family business, that he has bigger dreams. This is the serious issue that the movie approaches, and it handles it much more seriously and effectively than I would have anticipated. The ceremony itself, on the other hand, is where the movie has fun with itself.
You see, there's a battle between five contenders, the winner of whom will be crowned the Dragon Warrior and will then go on to kung-fu fight the much-feared Tai Lung, who has escaped from prison and is on a mad quest to secure dominance over the valley. "Tai lung," by the way, in Mandarin is written like this - 太冷, and it means "too cold."
Now, the head monk at the temple, a giant turtle named Oogway, is in charge of selecting one of five candidates who is the most qualified to take on Tai Lung and stop him. I missed the part where they explained why they don't just send all of them, but no matter. The whole thing is for fun, you remember. The five candidates are a spider-thin praying mantis about as threatening as a spider-tin praying mantis, a monkey voiced by Jackie Chan, a Tigress (Angelina Jolie), a Viper (Lucy Liu), and Crane (David Cross), although after a series of fortunate events Oogway ends up choosing Po.
The kung fu takes place without the constraints of live action, so it's obviously quite different from the traditional kung fu film, even the modern ones that make wide use of special effects, but there is plenty of fighting action and it's pretty impressive. The only drawback is something common to almost all animated movies and cartoons - the characters seem generally impervious to damage, even after suffering falls and hits that should kill them. The little birdies fly around their heads for a minute and the show goes on. Sure, it's for the kids, but it definitely makes the kung-fu a lot less effective.
Much of the comedy, however, is derived not from the slapstick fighting but from the that Po is a die-hard kung-fu fan and is suddenly thrown into close proximity with the Furious Five, who are nothing less than idols to him. Jack Black is provided with endless comedic opportunities in voicing a character who is resolutely chasing his dream of becoming the Dragon Warrior, while at the same-time becoming hopelessly tongue-tied and star-struck just by being in the presence of his competitors.
The animation isn't anything new, and we've either hit a wall as far as the possibilities of creating realism or there just wasn't any need for this movie to push the computer animation technology any further. I suspect the latter. As we may remember from the disappointing 2000 film Dinosaur, there are times when too much realism can make an animated movie a lot less fun than it should be.
Kung Fu Panda deserves the Oscar nomination that it has gotten for Best Animated Feature Film, but it won't win and it shouldn't. It's a charming and fun romp that is short enough that adults will be able to sit through it, but it doesn't carry the depth of meaning that movies like Toy Story or Shrek or this year's WALL-E do. The kids, however, are going to flip for it.