Friday, May 27, 2011

Kung Fu Panda 2 is a film I shouldn’t have seen. I’ve never seen the first Kung Fu Panda, I have a strong aversion to almost anything Dreamworks Animation oriented, and I’m still pretty stuffed up with a nasty taste of summer blockbuster from the shit-fest of all shit-fests that was Pirates of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. I’m a busy man these days and after blowing my opportunity to see The Hangover 2 I signed up, late and harried, to see the sequel to the very popular animated animals who do kung fu film to make sure I’d at least seen one film that came out this week. Surprisingly, even though the film neatly identifies all of the common traits of the summer blockbuster, I still came away from it with a warm, fuzzy feeling in me.

Movie Review - Kung Fu Panda

Again, I’ve never seen the first film, and I probably won’t jump through any hoops to check it out now, but from what I can tell, the first film finds Jack Black’s Po, a panda, who for some reason has chosen to learn kung-fu and become the heralded dragon warrior. Number two picks up with Po and company (a loose cadre of animals featuring a tigress (Angelina Jolie), a monkey (Jackie Chan), a crane (David Cross), a grasshopper (Seth Rogan), and a snake (Lucy Liu) off on another adventure to prevent an evil peacock (Gary Oldman) from blowing up the world with cannons. Along the way Po learns some life lessons about who he really is, and discovers the secret to a little thing called "inner peace." It isn’t rocket science. Kung Fu Panda 2 is pretty much every big budget children’s film every made, wearing a kung-fu uniform, with China as the background instead of fairytale land or a children’s bedroom. I don’t care who’s making the animated film (yes Pixar I’m pointing at you), the genre (it is a genre now, undoubtedly) has rules and a fairly basic storyline - originality is not the point. These kid’s films today exist entirely on execution and finding a new world in which to inject the life lessons and dramatic, but always happy conclusions. If they biff the execution (in my mind the Shrek films) or if the world created isn’t interesting enough (Hoodwinked anyone?) then the story falls flat. But, like any genre, if the creators are interesting people with interesting ideas, the strict guidelines become stepping stones to greatness, not chains.

Kung Fu Panda 2 does a fine job of existing within this strict guidelines without becoming just another ho-hum animated film. Much of this can be attested to the fantastic kung-fu battles that the film is positively riddled with (I heard a woman afterwards bemoaning the lack of humor, and the gratuitous ass-kicking that took its place). Jennifer Yuh, the director, I applaud your obvious research in to not only the actual kung-fu styles represented here, but also the kung-fu pictures these styles helped establish. The moves in the film are not only well put together on screen but they hum with a sort of zaniness you’d expect from schlocky kung fu flicks from the late 70s. Aside from that, the film bounces along with very little deviation from the go-on-a-quest-to-discover-yourself storyline we’ve all grown so accustomed to. I liked Kung Fu Panda 2. Did I feel any a bit of connection to the characters or the world? Probably not, but I didn’t leave gnashing my teeth at the sheer money grab of it all, and in this season of gold-bricking, that’s probably the best I can say from any major studio release.

- Noah Sanders -



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