It’s got a lot of animated kung fu fighting. If your 5 year old is allowed to see Power Rangers then s/he has already seen the level of violence in the film. FWIW I took my 5 year old daughter and it didn’t seem to phase her. The bad guy didn’t scare her and the fight scenes didn’t seem to upset her…and she upsets fairly easily.
-XT
There’s no blood, nobody dies (I think. The disposition of one character is kind of unclear, but whatever happens, it happens off-screen), there aren’t even any fart jokes. It’s got some kung fu battles, of course, but they are bloodless, mostly comic and free of fatalities. Even the bad guy doesn’t kill anyone, or even hurt them very badly.
Well, some of the rhino jailers might have gotten killed…hard to tell.
If they did, it was their own doing.
about that…
The villain escapes the prison, knocking out guards along the way. The warden blows up the roof and drops huge stactites (in a cave) on the walkway and so forth. No one is seen getting hurt, and the villain grabs some explosives and hurls them at the guards. The guards apparently survive being hit in the head with the improvised bomb, since they are big ruff tuff rhinos and a small, scared duck makes it out quite alive and well.
There was a vicious vegetable dismemberment at one part in the story though (when Po is making soup)…and then there was the dumpling battle…
Other than that there was some tree abuse throughout the movie and it’s quite possible several of them may not have made it (no actual trees were hurt in the filming of the movie though).
-XT
The evil guy had a great look and a great voice (thanks to Ian McShane). Good Scary eyes.
I am glad he was not too evil - sometimes animation goes over the top - for example - the one from Mulan (Shan-Yu - voiced by Miguel Ferrer) was pretty scary - the intense Sea-Lion chase from Happy Feet
Pretty entertaining all around. Though I think it would have been even better if the whole thing had been done in the kind of heightened anime style of the opening titles: the closer art gets to perfectly reproducing reality, the more boring it is.
Since the thread is winding down…did anyone else see the previews for the new animated Star Wars: Clone Wars trailer? First time I’ve seen it (haven’t been to a movie lately)…thought it looked interesting.
-XT
Not in my opinion.
Yes, I did. I was in fact thinking that maybe George Lucas would be at his best when he didn’t have to deal with actors.
I was also thinking (about the new Star Wars) that if this goes over well they could either redo the older versions of do another between versions thing (or perhaps after Return of the Jedi…there were plenty of books dealing with what happens after the 3rd episode).
-XT
Thank you for the opinions guys. My son doesn’t watch Power Rangers or cartoons in general, though I have shown him some older Disney flicks (e.g. Pinocchio and Bambi) and some Warner Bros. cartoons on DVD. So perhaps he will be ready for this. That could be a father’s day outing!
On the other hand, he doesn’t need more encouragement in trying to do flying leaps off the couch.
He should enjoy it quite a bit…and you will probably like it more than you think as well. Some good lessons in there too for a youngster…I know both my 5 year old and 8 year old had a lot of questions on the drive back, and not about all the kung fu stuff either.
Good luck and enjoy!
-XT
Once you can’t tell the difference between art and the thing it represents, you’ve lost the art. Art lies in what the artist adds to reality, how he changes it, reshapes it through his imagination. Jean Renoir said something like, when technology reaches the stage when we’re able to perfectly reproduce the experience of walking through a forest, when art has reached such a perfect state of reproductive fidelity, then what’s the difference between that and walking through a real forest? Reproducing exactly what you see in front of you doesn’t take any imagination, only technical skill. And when most of the technical skill is achieved by a computer rather than an artist, you’re one step further removed.
Don’t get me wrong; the computer is a great tool for artists. But not if their only goal is to hide the hand of the artist in a perfect, but false, reality.
Granted, *Kung Fu Panda *is not an example of the extreme (and still largely hypothetical) end of this spectrum; there’s a great deal of art in this movie. But the current preponderance of CGI animation is just more evidence, as far as I can see, of the continued degradation of the *art *of animation in favor of a fetish-like focus on physical realism in animation. The opening titles, in a stylized anime style, were fare more exciting to me, visually, then going, “ooh, look how real the hair looks!” in the rest of the movie.
I didn’t like that opening anime at all, and thought the CGI in KFP was quite visually appealing.
Incidentally, one aspect of this “art vs. realism” discussion that you’re missing is that realistic art has the ability to make the impossible look real.
Well that’s appealing if “real” is a goal in and of itself–what I referred to before as reality-as-fetish; less-realistic art (like traditional animation) can still make the impossible happen in your imagination. Like reading a novel; you don’t need every pixel of the image being communicated on the page to be reproduced in concrete detail in order to “experience” it in your imagination.
Making the impossible look real can, in most cases, just as easily be described as making the magical look mundane.
(Obviously this is more a discussion about what individual people look for in art than about what is “right” or “wrong” in art.)
I liked it very much. It was childlike without being childish and blatantly Disney. The animation was smooth and pretty, and I liked the effect with the cats’ eyes. Great intro with the bad guy, great characters, great everything. And I didn’t really recognize Dustin Hoffman at all. Pandas are cool.
Same here. I really don’t care for the anime style in general.
Agree with DtC and Opal FWIW.
-XT