Village of Pandas: KUNG FU PANDA 3

A fine conclusion to its trilogy, Kung Fu Panda 3 is as energetic and visually dazzling as you’d hope and expect from one of DreamWorks Animation’s very best franchises. What’s so continually satisfying about this series is its tradition of making what are effectively animated kung fu movies. Sure, they feature anthropomorphic cartoon animals living in a cartoony simulacrum of ancient China. But these are films with interfamily conflict, wizards and warlords, masters and students, training montages, action balanced between clever slapstick and dangerous dance, and heaps of mystical spirituality where inner peace and self-knowledge are the most effective skills and power the most awesome moves. I like imagining that somewhere there’s a kid who gets into vintage Jackie Chan or Shaw Brothers films because they’re so over the moon about this fun string of movies about a panda who learns to be a kung fu master.

These movies are plenty fun on their own terms, too. 3 picks up with Po the panda (Jack Black) and his kung fu teammates (tiger Angelina Jolie, mantis Seth Rogen, viper Lucy Liu, crane David Cross, and monkey Jackie Chan) enjoying down time in the peaceful valley they’ve saved twice over. Having become The Dragon Warrior and coming to peace with his tragic past, what’s left for Po to do? Well, Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) tells Po he needs to complete his training by finding inner strength. To do so, he must truly know who he is. Luckily enough, his long-lost biological father (Bryan Cranston) shows up in the village, eager to reconnect with the son he had to abandon all those years ago, and teach him the panda way. This gets Po excited, even though his adopted goose father (James Hong) fears his little panda cub will leave him forever. There’s a moving and special adoption story told with care through these silly figures.

But what would a kung fu movie be without external conflict? This one has a growling bull (J.K. Simmons), a villain defeated five centuries ago, escape from the spirit realm with an army of solid jade henchmen in tow. He’s on the rampage, out to capture the souls of all kung fu practitioners who stand in his way, and turn their lifeless bodies into more zombie soldiers to do his bidding. To learn how to defeat them, Po must travel to a secret panda village where maybe, just maybe, he can connect with ancient, long-forgotten panda magic. Screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger neatly – maybe too neatly – tie together his inner struggles with the needs of the action plot, leaving plenty of time to deliver heaping helpings of cute roly-poly panda antics. They’re adorable, and love to eat, hug, roll, dance, and sleep. What’s not to like? And then, when it’s time to get serious about defeating evil, they spring into action with the best of them.

Returning director Jennifer Yuh, who last time around broke the record for highest-grossing feature directed by a woman, works with co-director Alessandro Carloni (a longtime DreamWorks artist) to stage the film in bright, beautiful colors. It’s an extravagant explosion of fast-paced visual delights, swirling primary hues filling out lush exteriors and intricate architecture, snapping into high-contrast action when the adventure gets going. Where plot and character are concerned, this is a repetition, a riff on previous conflicts with character arcs consisting of reworked aspects of the first two films. But in motion, the movie moves and sings with contagious energy, each image colorful and intricately designed, bursting with zippy and clever choreography. Best are a mêlée that finds unexpectedly productive kung fu uses for pandas’ inherently cute lazy habits and bookending vibrant zero-g clashes in the spirit realm smashing swirls of glowing magic light through floating boulders.

The story boils down to the same be-yourself platitudes so many family films do, but at least it has the decency to be woo-woo mysto about it, and use it to hold up exciting, amusing, trippy, and striking imagery. The animators bring an elaborate fantasy look of the kind DreamWorks has been trying out these days (with this series, as well as their How to Train Your Dragons, Rise of the Guardians, and The Croods), even throwing split screens, hand-drawn interludes, and extreme color gradients into the mix of lush and buoyant imagery. As a combination reiteration and finale of the trilogy, it may not have the novelty of the first, or the weight of the second, but it is fun. If this is the last we see of Kung Fu Panda, it is a worthy conclusion and a perfect place to stop: with Po learning to love his two dads and be his best self, and with confetti, transcendence, warm and fuzzy reunions, and an angelic choir singing Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” in Chinese translation.

Good Eats: CHEF

Chef follows a man who once cooked for the love of it, but who, in his comfortable position as the head chef at a decent middlebrow restaurant, finds his passion dimmed by churning out the same old menu night after night. After a high-profile explosion of frustration that ends in him losing his job, he decides to strike out on his own and along the way rediscovers the passion that made him a chef in the first place. It’s tempting to read the movie as a metaphor for its own making. Writer, director, and star Jon Favreau got his start with relatively small productions (Swingers, Made) before getting bigger and bigger budgets (Elf, Zathura, Iron Man), eventually arriving at Cowboys & Aliens, a movie so blandly wedded to the worst storytelling impulses of modern Hollywood that I’ve already forgotten it ever existed. Now he turns up with the small, amiable Chef that says he would rather make something small and likable all on his own, instead of something big and predictable for someone else.

Both he and his character want to take their art wherever the muse leads them and have an audience show up to try the results because they trust the impulse behind it. Some scorn is reserved for customers who just want comfort food that provides what the consumer already expects. (What this metaphor says about someone like me who really likes his Iron Man 2, a movie he’s expressed disappointment with, is probably better left unexplored.) In any case, Chef follows a comfortable path as Favreau’s Chef Casper gets his professional groove back, reconciles with his ex-wife (Sofía Vegara), spends more time with his 10-year-old son (EmJay Anthony), and figures out what he really wants to be cooking.

It is not exactly a scrappy indie, but it’s probably as close to it as a baggy, pleasant, modestly budgeted production filled with recognizable actors can be. It’s the same kind of comfort food cinema Favreau has always been making, but the perspective is smaller and the heart more recognizably bleeding out on its sleeve. It is a shallow movie, and a long and shaggy one at that, but it has surface pleasures that keep it light, loose, and agreeable. Kramer Morgenthau’s bright cinematography finds the sun always shining. The montages of food prep look delicious. The non-stop brassy Cuban and New Orleans-influenced soundtrack is always rocking toe-tapping tunes. The film takes pleasure in its tasty dishes and booming music, and in the easy rapport amongst its characters.

As Chef Casper tries to figure out how to continue his career and find fulfillment in different aspects of his life, the movie ambles along, moving from a work/life balance comedy into a road movie in its second half. Along the way, we meet an ensemble cast of thin characters filled out by familiar faces. Dustin Hoffman plays his ex-boss. John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, and Scarlett Johansson worked with him at the restaurant. Oliver Platt plays a famous food critic whose negative review is the inciting incident that gets the Chef fired. (More on that later.) Amy Sedaris has a funny scene as a determined publicist and Robert Downey, Jr. turns up in a very small role as an eccentric businessman who wants someone to take a busted old food truck off his hands. None of these characters are particularly well developed, but the performers are enjoyable presences, able to step into the film and be entertaining for a moment or two without pulling focus from the ensemble as a whole.

It’s too fuzzy and insubstantial to be called a character study, but it at least has a sense of self-awareness. That can all too easily slip away from a writer-director-producer-star driven production. Chef looks upon the creative personality of Chef Casper with an understanding that his ego, pride, passion, and self-doubt combine to create the drive that leads him to success and are the same traits that lead to his blow-up, then feed his drive to reinvent himself. A lazier movie would take the critic character and make him only a snarky villain, but it’s refreshing to see that he’s presented as a man doing his job just as much as the chef is. And when his bad review upsets the chef so much that he throws a fit in the middle of dinner service that ends with him storming out jobless, it’s because the writing picked at preexisting insecurities. The chef knows he could do better. Getting called out on it frustrates him, but that frustration quickly becomes determination.

The movie is confidently pleasant, cooking up an agreeable couple hours of entertainment. It’s no great thing, but it’s enjoyable. Its heart is in the right place, made with as much love as the tasty-looking sandwiches featured prominently in the movie’s final stretch. I bet theaters showing Chef would do well if they added them to the concession stand menu.

Paws of Fury: KUNG FU PANDA 2

Dreamworks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 2, like Kung Fu Panda before it, delivers lively action sequences (and slapstick) with choreography capable of equaling, even besting, live-action adventure. Animation has the possibility to be the triumph of imagination over practicality, and here that’s completely the case with characters flipping, punching, flying, kicking, and stomping through intricate hand-to-hand combat in ways that would simply be too dangerous and impractical to ask of real creatures. In the summer of 2008, Kung Fu Panda had the best action sequences you could find on the big screen. I’m not so sure 2 will end up in a similar place – the novelty’s gone, for one thing – but it sure is fun.

The first film, set in a medieval China populated solely by anthropomorphized English-speaking animals, featured Po (Jack Black), a roly-poly panda, discovering his true calling to be a kung fu master. He trained with red panda Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) to become one of a group of kung fu masters (a Lucy Liu viper, an Angelina Jolie tiger, a Jackie Chan monkey, a David Cross crane, and a Seth Rogen mantis) who protect a humble little valley. That film gained its fun and its momentum from the challenges in the training of the Kung Fu Panda as he prepared to help his new colleagues defeat an outside threat to their safety.

In good sequel form, Kung Fu Panda 2 ups the ante. There’s an evil peacock (Gary Oldman) who has become determined to take over China by harnessing the power of fireworks to blast away any kung fu challenge that comes his way. His first step towards this goal took place a couple dozen years earlier when, after receiving a prophecy that a black and white warrior would defeat him, he slaughtered a village of innocent pandas. One panda, a baby, managed to escape unharmed and was found and adopted by a noodle-cooking goose (James Hong). That panda was Po. So, this time the conflict’s personal, but only for the audience at first. Po doesn’t know where he came from, and his adopted father only knows so much. It’s a mystery to him.

Rather than merely recycle the plot beats of the earlier film, screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger (with uncredited assistance from Charlie Kaufman) take the opportunity to flesh out the backstory of the central character. Rooting the new plot’s impetus in Po’s past, along with his desire to learn more about it, helps to propel the emotions as well as the action, giving it a bit of pleasing depth. The fighting animals head off across the wilderness once they hear that this peacock has taken over his ancestral town and is planning to use it as a base from which to launch his dastardly deeds. With the mystery of Po’s origins weighing heavily on the plotting, exposition here is given a satisfying kick of emotion.

Under the direction of Jennifer Yuh Nelson, the animation is gorgeously rendered, tactile and fluid, beautifully lit in all the right ways. This could be a film just to look at, worth the price of admission just to stare. But luckily the story the visuals tell is worthy of attention as well, though it feels a bit too formulaic in its structure, which isn’t helped by the opening prologue that tells the audience all about the panda massacre which robs Po’s late discovery of much of it’s power. But he’s searching not just for information. Most importantly, he’s searching for a way to find inner peace. It may be trite, it may be an easy indefinable plot point, but it’s also a quest imbued with such elemental qualities that it’s hard to argue with it.

It’s not a film of zen meditation and grim personal history. There’s boundless irrepressible energy that pushes the whole thing forward. Not just a fast zip to the credits, this is a speedy sprightly delight with a surprising level of emotion. It’s a fun time even though, with an all-too-obvious structure and an inelegantly deployed ensemble (other than Po, characterization remains surface level), I felt the fun was ultimately a little less than what the first film dished out. This is shaping up to be a fine series of kung fu movies for kids, and one that feels respectful of the live-action genre used as inspiration. And if some of those kids, as they get a little older, feel driven to dive deeper into said genre, that could only be an added value to cinephilia.

Added note: It’s a shame that a fun teaser of a final scene, that hints at a direction for a future plot line, is separated from the end credits by the words “The End.” Who do they think they’re fooling?