SETH Rogen calls “Kung Fu Panda” co-star Jack Black “about one-eighteenth panda.” Not to question anyone’s ancestry, but that seems a low-ball estimate.
Black plays the title character as if he were born in a bamboo patch, turning the latest from DreamWorks Animation into a big, plush funball. Even his voice is roly-poly, which sets him up perfectly to embody Po the Panda in a sort of Chinese take on “Nacho Libre.”
As in that movie, Black starts out as a humble food server in a foreign land who yearns to be a legend of combat (this time the character’s mask is built-in). Slinging noodles at a humble restaurant (no one seems to notice that his father is a duck), Po is a tomato-shaped fanboy, a sort of Hairy Knowles, who thrills to the deeds of legendary martial artists the Furious Five. They include: Tigress (Angelina Jolie, who is not famous because of her voice), Mantis (Rogen, who doesn’t get enough to do) and Monkey (Jackie Chan). Po pictures fighting beside them, “his enemies [going] blind from overexposure to pure awesomeness.”
Black’s bazooka delivery makes that line, and pretty much all of them, funny. If the guy rattled off the iTunes licensing agreement, it would be funnier than “What Happens in Vegas.” As one of the Furious Five is about to be anointed the next Dragon Warrior, Po schemes to watch – but instead tumbles into the middle of the ceremony and finds himself given the honor. “There are no accidents,” proclaims the placid, Obi-Wan-like Master Oogway the turtle (Randall Duk Kim). Oogway leaves it to the more ornery Yoda figure, a tiny red panda called Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman, an excellent foil), to make something of the pillowy mammal. Po not only can’t see the path to true enlightenment, he can’t see his toes. He has to be tricked into training by making it part of lunch.
Adding to the urgency is the problem of the kung fu maven who went bad, the imprisoned snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane), who is planning a jailbreak and a raid on the scroll that promises ultimate power.
The animation is dazzling, so lovingly detailed you can make out individual hairs on the titular beastie, and full of bright Chinese images. Background characters at the restaurant – pigs and bunnies – are as cute and friendly looking as Richard Scarry creations, while a death is rendered with oblique charm by a blizzard of petals, and the action set pieces, such as Tai Lung’s prison break, are boldly stylized eye-poppers.
Though the story is ostensibly similar to the cliché of a Westerner learning to accept Eastern ways – recently seen, for instance, in “Forbidden Kingdom” – the story is infiltrated by invincibly American ideals: to eat as much as we want, to make as much of a racket as we want, to “wash our pits in the pool of Sacred Tears.”
Po speaks loudly and carries big shtick. Let the rest of the world cringe at our hyperconfidence, our charisma, our pure awesomeness.