DVD: Kung Fu Panda

I'll be fair and preface this review by telling you that I personally don't find Jack Black as hilarious as everyone else does. I find him bearable, but slightly enjoyable only on occasion. He's just a little too wacky and "look-at-me-I'm-fat-and-loud-and-silly-remember-Chris-Farley-wasn't-he-great-don't-you-miss-him-and-his-comic-style?" for me to enjoy. Luckily, he tones it down for his voice performance in this one, a fact that makes this movie a better Jack Black fare than most, in my opinion.

In this movie, Po (Jack Black) is a fat loser who works for his father at a restaurant. His father is, curiously enough, a duck, and the film never explores the obviously available adoption subplot (although I swear they get really close at one point toward the end). If this were a longer, deeper film, I'll bet that issue would have been addressed, but alas, it is not. Anyway, Po accidentally disrupts a ceremony to select the Dragon Warrior and is chosen to begin his training as the new and incredibly unlikely Dragon Warrior and thus defeat the evil snow leopard Tai Lung, and, as with all unlikely circumstances in animated films, hilarity ensues. That's my favorite phrase in the film critic's handbook.

Kung Fu Panda is funny and lightly enjoyable, but Dreamworks continues to wipe the ass of its infinitely superior competitor Pixar. Kung Fu Panda seems like Dreamworks's response to The Incredibles, except that The Incredibles was an amazing work of film about how if you use your talents and work with others, you can solve any problem, no matter how great. Kung Fu Panda's message is that if you think you're special, even if you're fat and lazy and put no work into improving yourself, you can take on any foe selfishly for glory and succeed. Reward for no effort! It's the American way (let's hope Obama can change that). At least that's my interpretation, but if you watch the movie with it in mind, you can clearly see this moral in the film.

Not only is the message frustrating, the animation quality is so lackluster after having seen a film like Wall-E that it makes one wonder why the hell movies of the Dreamworks standard are even produced if we know that there is something out there so much better. Comparing the two is like watching a five-year-old with Sock 'em Boppers take on Mike Tyson with broken glass glued to his gloves.

Another deficiency that is a hallmark of Dreamworks is their reliance on celebrity voices. In fact, their credibility almost entirely reliant on the recognizability of the celebrities hired to perform the voices. Sure the jokes are funny and the gags are enjoyable, but the stories never even attempt at any sort of depth. The best we get is some shallow "believe in yourself" moral that every family movie ever made has jammed down our throats. Shark Tale was the worst of this because the animated character were even designed to LOOK like the actors.

There are three levels of animated family films, it seems. There are films that are rich and meaningful to adults but appropriate and enjoyable for kids, films that are fun and appropriate for kids but ultimately cheap and meaningless, and there are films that are made only for kids that are torturous for adults. Pixar makes the first kind, and Disney used to. Dreamworks and Disney now make the second kind, and I do appreciate the fact that they make films that kids can watch that don't make parents want to murder their kids for subjecting them to them, and then there is the last kind. Now, thanks to Pixar and Dreamworks, the public now knows that family films can be entertaining to parents, so I consider it lazy and criminally abusive to parents to make animated films that are simply unbearable to anyone over the age of ten. Everyone knows that young kids like to watch movies literally hundreds of times, so I think any movie producer that knowingly finances a film like, say, any sort of Bratz creation, should be instantly black-balled from Hollywood and summarily whipped with the end of an extension cord then abandoned in the Nevada desert in the nude in the middle of the night.

In all, Kung Fu Panda is not the worst way to spend five bucks and ninety minutes, but it's certainly not the best. It is mildly enjoyable, but will never stand out in a list of computer-animated films like Shrek or every Pixar film would. Some people liked it much more than I did, however, so I would recommend it based on that more than I would based on my own experience with the movie, though, in all, I cannot in good conscience give a glowing review.

On one final note, I would warn parents that the action in this movie was actually rather intense for a kids' film, so if you are of the extensively vigilant breed of parent (over-protective), then you might want to shy away from this one.

Oh, and, David Cross is awesome.

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Special Features:

• Commentary with Filmmakers
• Meet The Cast
• The Tech of Kung Fu Panda
• The World of Panda: Conservational International Piece
• DreamWorks Animation Video JukeBox