Kung-fu Panda is a rollicking, stylishly rendered martial-arts action animation film that is message oriented and just a wee-bit ticklish!
Kung-fu Panda
Cast: Jack Black, Jackie Chan
Director(s): Mark Osborne, John Stevenson
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Kung-fu Panda is a rollicking, stylishly rendered martial-arts action animation film that is message oriented and just a wee-bit ticklish! The film borrows its 'fight styles' from several martial arts films of yore. It begins with a dream sequence rendered in 'manga' - two-dimensional exaggerated caricaturing and then suddenly once the dream ends, you are transported into the ancient Chinese valley of Peace where only talking animals reside.
Po (Jack Black) is a roly-poly Panda who day-dreams of being a legendary warrior while in reality he has to work in the noodle shop run by his father, a Stork, by the name of Mr Ping (James Hong). At a nearby temple Master Oogway (Randall Duk kim) has had a vision which foretells the escape of the evil Tia Lung (Ian McShane) — the psychotic snow leopard, and it therefore becomes imperative for him to discern who becomes the next dragon warrior. Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) already has five candidates — Monkey (Jackie Chan), Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Viper (Lucy Liu), Crane (David Cross) and Mantis (Seth Rogen) but none of them make the cut. Instead it is Po who gets anointed following a bizarre series of unwitting incidents. The rest of the film deals with how Po uses the secret weapon to destroy Tia Lung.
The story is standard issue for anime and just as predictable, but it has a serious bent — the message is all about self-belief and it comes across beautifully. There is plenty of martial arts action and it's all done with a cartoonish cleverness and verve. The pace is relentless; full of exhilarating action, right from Po's dream to his real time anointment as dragon warrior, his subsequent training, the fight-antics by the furious five, Tia Lung's escape from his dungeon prison and the battle royale for ultimate supremacy - they are all rendered in high energy.
There's an oriental lushness in the intricately textured detailing, the character drawings are elegantly rendered, the computer generated imagery is visually stunning and the animation technique is the best that we have seen in a long while from Dreamworks.
The dialogues are quite chuckle-worthy, the character development is expectedly shallow and the voice acting is just right.
Directors Mark Osborne and John Stevenson use the CGI to great effect — creating a series of visual frames that are astonishingly beautiful. They are likely to linger in your memory for a long-long time!
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