Most films live up to expectations. Some utterly disappoint. Others are pleasant surprises. Kung Fu Panda falls into the latter category. There’s just no way an animated action-adventure comedy about a chubby, under-achieving panda seeking martial arts greatness should have worked. However, instead of collapsing under the weight of its own formulaic mediocrity, Kung Fu Panda offers genuine excitement and indisputable thrills.
The premise is as old as storytelling itself — the archetypical everyman (everypanda?) who yearns for a different path than the bland one life has dealt him and instead sees himself at the center of great, even renowned, events. As is standard in all such stories, the only person who believes in the everyman is himself, despite the fact that he shows little promise and displays none of the attributes that would lead one to believe that greatness lies buried within.
Po (Jack Black) is a corpulent panda who works in a noodle shop in a remote village that sits in the shadow of the most famous kung fu training academy in China. Though Po spends his days serving famished customers, he dreams of becoming a legendary kung fu warrior. When the treacherous snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane), who was once taught the ways of kung fu at the academy but was imprisoned for life for attempting to use it to further his obsession with power, escapes and vows revenge, the wise Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) announces that he will select the Golden Dragon warrior who is prophesied to destroy Tai Lung once and for all. Po, intent on witnessing the event, abandons his gastronomic duties and inadvertently finds himself singled out as the village’s savior.
Kung Fu master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), who is still tormented by his inability to see what Tai Lung was becoming, is convinced Oogway made a grave error in choosing the below-average panda instead of one of his spectacularly gifted students. He puts Po through every test imaginable and although Po fails spectacularly every time, he refuses to give up. Gradually Po wins Shifu and the others’ affections, but will he learn what is required of him in time to defeat the most fearsome threat the land has ever seen?
Like Robin Williams in Aladdin, Jack Black is given a lot of adlibbing freedom here. Po is less an original character than a furry personification of the funnyman himself. And while Black — and indeed the entire film — is genuinely amusing, it is Kung Fu Panda’s audacious and completely unexpectedly breathtaking action scenes that set it apart. Borrowing from the Wuxia martial-arts-as-supernatural-ballet aesthetics that power Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and other similar films, Kung Fu Panda is a far more exciting and abundantly more exhilarating than it has any right to be.
It’s as if the script, rich with fight scenes and heady mentor/student dynamics, was originally intended for a live action film and someone, in a stroke of mad genius, decided to populate the story with talking animals instead, toss in a bunch of slapstick comedy, and inexplicably turn it into a kid’s movie. And it works. Some animated films insert subversive, sophisticated humor to keep adults entertained. Kung Fu Panda goes a different route, using action to ensure that both generations leave the theater amused and thrilled.
Sure, we’ve seen the “never-judge-a-book-by-its-cover” movie before and doubtless will again, but rarely is it delivered in this satisfying a package.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.