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Kung Fu Panda 2008 - aka- Eye of the Panda |
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Posted on
1:00 p.m. PST June 11, 2008 |
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff
06/06/2008
Animation is a kick, but plot doesn't rise to challenge
The star of "Kung Fu Panda" is not Jack Black.
It's not even Po, the martial arts-obsessed animated panda
for whom Black provides dude-acious line readings. Rather,
 the
movie's stars are production designer Raymond Zibach, art
director Tang Heng, visual effects supervisor Markus
Manninen, and the 4,000-processor Linux cluster at the heart
of DreamWorks Animation's computer rendering farm.
Not exactly red-carpet names, but welcome to the modern
family film - all form, no function. "Kung Fu Panda" is
prototypical non-Pixar animated product as we've come to
expect it: a lushly beautiful, even soulful, visual
experience yoked to a pro forma story line that wouldn't
fool a 3-year-old.
What the designers, processors, and workstation galley
slaves have created is a phantasmagoric medieval Chinese
otherworld - a Crayola-colored riff on the kung fu
landscapes of countless Shaw Brothers movies with titles
like "The New One-Armed Swordsman" and "Eight-Diagram Pole
Fighter." Those originals and their ferocious near-camp
sensibility have filtered into the American pop
consciousness by way of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,"
Quentin Tarantino movies, and the Cartoon Network. Now they
get their Happy Meal moment, slo-mo tiger leaps and all.
So familiar are the genre's cliches by now that bolting them
onto the tired studio family-film framework - lots of
character slapstick interspersed with believe-in-yourself
moralizing - fails to enliven either. "The Forbidden
Kingdom" has already come and gone this year, and "Kung Fu
Panda" goes nowhere surprising even as its images unscroll
handsomely before our eyes. The sound could go out in the
theater, and you wouldn't ask for your money back.
Actually, that might count as an improvement, since you
wouldn't have to deal with Black or the limp fortune-cookie
aphorisms that tilt the film in the direction of yellowface
("There is no good or bad news. There is only news"). On the
other hand, you wouldn't be able to hear Dustin Hoffman give
his adenoids a workout as Master Shifu, the be-robed red
panda who serves as this movie's Yoda. Hoffman's crafty honk
is heard too rarely in movies these days, and we'll take it
where we find it.
Black's Po is a bumbling, oversize bear who worships wuxia
the way fanboys venerate Han Solo action figures. The son of
a noodle shop owner (veteran character actor James Hong)
who's a goose - the movie seems about to explain that one
but then dodges - he crashes the ritual choosing of the
Dragon Warrior and ends up with the honor himself.
This doesn't sit well with Master Shifu or the martial arts
experts known as the Furious Five - Tigress (Angelina Jolie),
Crane (David Cross), Viper (Lucy Liu), Mantis (Seth Rogen),
and Monkey (Jackie Chan). The villainous Tai Lung (Ian
McShane) has escaped from his fortress prison, though, and a
stalwart hero is called for.
Cue the training montage, the humiliation of the bumbler by
his betters, the search for self-respect, the final
confrontation - "Kung Fu Panda" tours this highlight reel
with the passion of a PowerPoint presentation. Black and
Hoffman get most of the dialogue, with the rest of the
players limited to a few lines each, but Black's neo-Ralph
Kramden shtick wears thin fast. Where's the wit?
It's in the look of the thing; occasionally in its pacing,
too. I'd swap the entire movie for the sequence in which Tai
Lung escapes his dungeon, outmaneuvering the complacent
rhino guards and swarms of arrows to clamber toward
daylight. It owes too much to the Bridge of Khazad-dûm in
"The Lord of the Rings," but no matter - the scene's alive
with the thrill of craft. Same goes for a nighttime sequence
in which the Furious Five leap and tumble over pagoda roofs;
for a brief second you sense the fluidly beautiful kiddie
action movie "Kung Fu Panda" might have been.
Notice that neither scene features the film's star. Without
Black's participation, though, DreamWorks wouldn't know how
to sell the movie and audiences wouldn't know what box to
put it in (this was the marketing problem that vexed the
vastly superior "Ratatouille"). "Kung Fu Panda" illustrates
the dilemma CGI movies find themselves in: They're suspended
on a rickety bridge between product and moviemaking, and the
boards of our interest are beginning to rot away.
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Original Review Link |
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