Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. Today’s reviewer seems to think so. And before you start yelling plant, consider this. No less an avowed Dreamworks-hater than Jerry “Cartoon Brew” Beck recently wrote on his site that KUNG-FU PANDA is one of the best CGI animated features ever made, comparing it to THE INCREDIBLES. Go ahead... call Beck a plant. I dare you. There’s no more independent voice writing about animation online these days, and his opinion on the film only confirms what I’ve been hearing since last year... KUNG-FU PANDA appears to be the real deal, a kung-fu film for kids that plays like no-shit Shaw Brothers. God, I want to see this thing right now. It sounds so awesome.
Hey, guys. Long time reader, first time contributor. I just got back from an advance screening of KUNG FU PANDA at the AMC Loews Meteron in San Francisco. It didn’t seem like a “test screening” exactly – the movie was 90% done (the other 10% was in storyboard or animatic form) and I don’t know how much they could really change at this point, though there were two studio reps with clipboards outside, asking for people’s opinions. Overall, I loved this film, and I am not a Dreamworks plant. Here, I’ll prove it: I hated SHARK TALE. Hated, hated, hated, hated, HATED the fuck out of SHARK TALE. If I had the money and resources I would buy up every copy of Shark Tale, bulldoze them and burn the remains. Dreamworks’ formula, of course, has been to fill their movies with as many huge A-list stars as possible, then use THAT to market the movie. This has been a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it gives the creators of the films license to sneak in some cartoonish subversion without it offending their corporate masters (OVER THE HEDGE), on the other hand it permits Jerry Seinsmelled to waltz right into Jeffrey Katzenberg’s office and hijack the entire animation department for the sake of ANOTHER animated insect movie, this one based on a crap pun title! And now that they’ve exhausted the well of fairy tale jokes and used mediocre marketing to somehow run Aardman (!!!) into the ground, Dreamworks has decided to make animated versions of genre films. First, with PANDA, they take on Hong Kong cinema, and next year they’ll take on Roger Corman B-pictures with MONSTERS VS. ALIENS IN 3-D. Ideally, it might have been smarter to reverse that order – sci-fi schlock was considered kind of a joke even in its heyday, and it’s relatively easy to openly, childishly mock the conventions of that genre and still say you’re “paying homage.” But based on sheer concept, KUNG FU PANDA sounds like it was designed to piss off geeks. Personally, I haven’t seen nearly as many Kung Fu movies as I should have, but I appreciate that to replicate such an exact genre, you need to possess the skill, patience and discipline of a kung fu warrior yourself. You CERTAINLY can’t muck it up with Joan Rivers cameos and references to cell phone commercials. Fortunately, KUNG FU PANDA does not. As far as I can tell, they got the genre down PAT. My hats off to the crew here, who used animation completely to their benefit – since nothing in animation is spontaneous and everything has to be planned to the smallest detail, they were able to choreograph every last movement in every battle sequence to pinpoint timing and accuracy that would put Rube Goldberg to shame. Now I’m sure the supergeeks can point to each amazing action sequence in this movie and say “they stole that from Blablabla and watered it down, they stole THAT from Blablabla 2 and watered IT down…” But as a typical American moviegoer with a bulging stomach overflowing with popcorn grease, all I noticed was that the action sequences in this film kicked fucking ass. In particular, there’s a scene about halfway through the movie where the imprisoned villain of the piece escapes from his shackles with only a feather, and escapes from the prison with only his wits. I’m as jaded as any internet hipster, and this scene completely blew me away. Oddly enough, the one big weak point in this movie is…the star. A little Jack Black goes a long way, and here, as the titular Po, he spends more or less the entire movie Being Jack Black, and all that that implies, from the “rock and roll” awe and wonder he gets from seeing his idols in action, to his nervous little “um”s and “yeah, well”s in the dialogue. I understand that the executives THINK you need stars and comedy to sell an animated film these days. Disney executives thought the same thing when they shoehorned Eddie Murphy into MULAN ten summers ago. Fortunately this film isn’t nearly as bad, but it still would have been far better if they hadn’t tried so hard to be funny – there’s only one scene where the laughs feel earned, and it comes from some of the physical humor when Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) uses dumplings to train Po. The film works so well as a legitimate animated kung fu movie that Jack Black’s “comedy” just kind of feels out of place. In fact, only about half of the casting choices feel especially sensible, at least on paper – Jackie Chan, James Hong and Randall Duk Kim are no-brainers of course, but David Cross is utterly wasted (though he does have a funny scene with Black where he awkwardly tries to get him to go away without rudely SAYING “go away”), and I wouldn’t trust Seth “Animation’s Inexplicable New Golden Boy” Rogen to water my lawn without incident, much less give me acupuncture as a frustratingly small kung-fu warrior. Fortunately, everyone does the best they can with the roles they have, and at times you even forget the wisened-if-justifiably-nervous Shifu is Ben Braddock. The story is standard-issue – the universe is populated entirely by animals who act like humans, not unlike Disney’s ROBIN HOOD (the even have a bunch of rhino prison guards, the leader voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan, who look A LOT like Prince John’s rhino guards). Storywise, they don’t really do anything particularly new with the kung-fu genre, or even the “fat loveable loser makes good” genre. But in a way, that’s a good thing – like Tarantino, they seem to subliminally acknowledge that there IS no way to improve the story of a Hong Kong movie, because that’s not really the point – the best you can do is adapt the Hong Kong cinema formula to your particular style of filmmaking. It would not be stretching at all to call this the KILL BILL of CGI animated films (I even counted three pieces of music from KILL BILL they reused, though those may have just been temp tracks). The fact that they saved the inevitable "Kung Fu Fighting" remix for the end credits speaks volumes about the restraint Dreamworks showed here – they didn’t even resort to that old “the characters lips are out of sync because we’re making fun of bad dubs, look how funny we are” chestnut. With this and WALL-E, this is shaping up to be a good summer for CGI animation with minimalist dialogue, almost as if the medium itself was atoning for the Unnecessary Dialogue-choked HORTON HEARS A WHO. I wouldn’t be surprised if martial arts classes take a sudden upturn in youth enrollment following this film’s release – above all else, this film succeeds spectacularly in making kung fu look fucking AWESOME. If you use this, call me NoodleDream.
