Two Bits

As I slipped on my shoes to go see Kung Fu Panda with my friends, I couldn’t help but wonder why we weren’t seeing a “real” movie like Hulk or The Happening. Perhaps it was the trailer I watched on Youtube, which I closed as soon as it revealed how the panda would begin to break through his training.

I found myself expecting to see a cutesy, Pixar-inspired kids movie at the theater. Only this time instead of penguins or bees, it was all kinds of animals, and they knew kung fu!

I even tried to predict the movie on the way to my car. “The protagonist will stumble through his training,” I thought. “Then they will all learn that he can kung fu in his own way, just in time for him to defeat the antagonist.”

Happily, I was proved wrong on all counts. The humor was not cheesy. The plot was not predictable – or at least took a few unpredictable turns on the way to its predictable ending. And, shockingly enough, the action was pure delight.

Probably one of the most shocking things about Kung Fu Panda was the depth of its characters. I can think of at least four dynamic characters in the movie, which is a record for most adult movies, let alone an animated film marketed for family-friendly audiences. In fact, the plot of the movie is only partly wrapped up in Po’s (the panda’s) coming-of-age, and the plot progresses not through action as much as through character development.

Zathura is another movie I’ve seen only recently that, I thought, did a fairly good job with character development. Zathura is not nearly as good of a film as Kung Fu Panda, as far as plot goes, but it’s striking to find so many “kids” movies with multi-dimensional characters. If these movies maintain this level of quality, I imagine parenting children will not be nearly as torturesome for me as it was for my parents, who had to slog through Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Another thing that struck me was I watched the movie was how well its creators had utilized the animated space to pull off absolutely enthralling action sequences. The movie has honest to God good kung fu in it, and the animation did not just provide context for anthropomorphized protagonists; it also allowed for kung fu that simply could not happen in live action films, no matter how much CG was utilized. Cartoons have been doing this the days of Bugs Bunny, of course, but to see it used to pull off post-Matrix kung fu is a wonderful thing. The bridge fight scene, in particular, pulled this off extremely well.

Dreamworks has often played second-fiddle to Pixar’s animated films, and while I have not seen WALL-E, it certainly seems as though Pixar is no longer the only studio to produce classics like these.