I’d heard that Kung Fu Panda was amazing but it just didn’t seem like something that I’d like. So I avoided seeing it in theaters and forgot about it. Well, it was just on HBO and I saw it for the first time.
It was amazing. The scene where Tai Lung escapes was really exciting, in particular.
So yeah. I’m glad I finally saw it.
As a kid’s cartoon, it’s OK. As a martial arts film, it’s one of the best ever made.
Unusually, for a Dreamworks anaimted film, it did everything right.
They are making a sequel, which is where inevitably they will do everything wrong.
It really did. Even the Celebrity Voices were well-picked enough that they won’t get dated (looking at you, Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy).
It’s really an excellent movie, competing both with Pixar and classic kung fu movies.
How to Train Your Dragon is probably the best 3D animated kids movie I’ve seen, and Monsters vs. Aliens was pretty fun. Looking back through their history, it does seem like everything before that was pretty medium, though.
Not to turn this into a generic Dreamworks Animation thread, but I didn’t like Monsters vs Aliens and was underwhelmed by How to Train Your Dragon.
MvA had some nice sci-fi/horror homages but the pop culture riffing was overdone and the plot was thin and obvious. Dragon was an improvement but it just felt too contemporary, and the idea of Celtic vikings with American children seemed bizarre, frankly.
Maybe I should check-out Panda, but I haven’t seen a Dreamworks Animation film yet that was anything more than fleetingly entertaining.
Kung Fu Panda struck me as completely mediocre and predictable, but it’s probably my fault for seeing it directly after Wall-E.
I think Kung Fu Panda is wonderful and probably one of my all time favorites. It’s obviously better than the other Dreamworks animated films, but I would put it ahead of several Pixar movies as well.
The plot structure is certainly predictable, I’ll grant that, but it’s executed extremely well. The primary characters are all interesting, the animation is good, the choreography is excellent, and best of all there’s no cheap over-reliance on pop culture references like most of Dreamworks’ movies. At most there are homages to classic kung fu movies.