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Bear knuckles

Turning martial arts into family entertainment
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 25th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Panda technique: Jack Black voices a slacker bear's path to warrior status.
Kung Fu Panda


Directed by John Stevenson and Mark Osborne
With the voices of Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen and Ian McShane
Kung fu cinema has long employed cartoon physics, where time and space are warped to provide extra-human leaps and jumps, not to mention sped-up kicks and slaps that allow a hero or heroine to cut down an army in a matter of minutes. It’s interesting, then, to finally see a piece of kung fu animation that never quite transcends or betters the live-action action of House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; indeed, takes all of its cues from the Hong Kong choreography of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
Kung Fu Panda is an homage to Hong Kong done as family entertainment. Though this latest DreamWorks computer-generated feature has its share of martial-arts violence, it’s all tempered with slapstick shtick and broad comedy for the kids. And Kung Fu Panda, playing at selected kinos in English, is for kids, lacking those nods to adults (often through sexual innuendo) that DreamWorks’ Bee Movie possessed. (For an adult send-up of kung fu, the standard is still the Fist Full of Yen segment from Kentucky Fried Movie).
Po is a slacker panda who dreams of being a kung fu fighter while serving up grub at his father’s noodle stand. He’s one of those slouching, flabby males who has never transcended the stage of needing to collect action figures, which line his windowsill like totems to the muscled vitality that he’ll never acquire.
His favorite figures are of the Furious Five: Tigress, Viper, Mantis, Crane and Monkey, representing five of the six major forms of kung fu. This fantastic quintet lives in Po’s city, and they are on the verge of having to prove themselves to the great kung fu master Oogway, an ancient turtle who has decided to finally name the hero of heroes, the “Dragon Warrior.” Shlub fan-boy Po is anxious to watch the Furious Five being put through their paces before Oogway and their personal master, Shifu.
Unfortunately, Po arrives too late to enter the arena, so he devises various Acme-inspired schemes for getting inside. One, a chair affixed with firecrackers, will finally blast him over the wall and into Oogway’s consideration. The sage turtle decides that Po, rather than the fab five, is the warrior he has long looked for.
If the five and their master Shifu are incredulous, the city’s populous is openly disdainful of Po as Oogway’s pick. And it doesn’t take long for Po to earn everyone’s scorn, as he’s hardly the picture of heroism with his mouth smeared from snacks and his ill-fitting trousers ever sliding toward his ankles.
Shifu makes it his task to punish Po, both emotionally and physically, so that the panda will finally slink from the ring to allow Tigress or Viper or Monkey to assume the title of Dragon Warrior. But Oogway remains firm in his decision. Worse is to come for Shifu, when he learns that his evil protégé Tai Lung has escaped from imprisonment, and is on his way to the city to defeat the Furious Five and his former master, and claim the title of Dragon Warrior for himself.
Will the fat boy come through? Naturally, once Shifu discovers that Po’s Jellystone diet is the key to getting him to fight.
Directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne (the latter best known for SpongeBob SquarePants) keep the DreamWorks computers generating action sequences, though the writing is occasionally groan-worthy. Jack Black does a fine job of giving the flabby Po voice, while Dustin Hoffman seems just as perfect as the scheming Shifu. In a nice touch, the voice of Monkey has been thrown to Jackie Chan himself, and the menacing bass of Ian McShane gives the leopard Tai Lung all the grim allure of George Sanders’ Shere Khan in Jungle Book. The voice work of Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu and Seth Rogen are mere bill-fillers. As for the animation, it’s above-average, except for one segment.
Predelle are the small-scale narrative panels found running the sides and bottoms of many Renaissance altar paintings. It is in these small panels, exempt from the conventional iconography, where the revolutions in style and painting technique took place. Something like the predella seems to exist in DreamWorks animation. While the studio’s films are state-of-the-computer products, small, innovative revolutions are always happening on the margins. In Bee Movie it was the work of yU+Co. for the film’s end titles (the best part of the film). With Kung Fu Panda, it’s the very opening of the film, a dream sequence.
Directed by master British animator James Baxter, Po’s dream is a startling piece of animation, owing something to Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack (which borrowed from the artist Shag’s Tiki fantasias stylistically), and much to Chinese shadow puppetry. Baxter’s work is breathtaking for its sophistication — a sophistication that DreamWorks sadly can’t quite trust its audience to embrace just yet.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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