Kung Fu Panda (2011)

11 months ago

Kung Fu Panda (2011)

by Edward Montgomery

“…do not strive for Buddhahood: you will grope in the dark and never find it…”

To lay my cards on the table from the start: I love the original Kung Fu Panda. Adore it. Bought it. Watched it on a monthly basis for a while. Actually gave a Dreamworks film Pixar-like status. (Let’s not talk about the year of Ratatouille to really explain that sentiment, but you get the idea.) Yet, with my history of loving animation, I can’t bring myself to like Kung Fu Panda 2. When I asked myself why, I answered that it was “too formulaic”. We had pumped too much Hollywood in it: too many action sequences, too many kitschy moments of friendship, and too many predictable elements throughout. Yet, my answer was a paradox, but only when we separate the word “formula” from the word “Hollywood”. Which, I believe, it should be.

The original film was by far the simpler of the two; Po’s first story was a pure cinematic interpretation of the classic bildungsroman and nothing more. By all rights, Kung Fu Panda 2, as a sequel, is a more complex and more interesting story. Kung Fu Panda 2 impresses me visually as it changes animated tones in its flashbacks using a simpler palette and style, and even contains overhead shots and views reminiscent of Chomet’s The Illusionist. What’s more, the sequel contains extremely adult themes: the first being a fuzzy and undetermined identity (pay attention Generation Y), and more importantly, that of pandacide by Kung Fu Panda’s 2’s surprisingly attractive villain, Shen. But I still walked out unsatisfied. I began to ask myself: what had happened, what had failed?

And really, what is formula? Without going over thousands of years of source documents (step 1: read Aristotle’s Poetics), the most modern and appropriate answers come from a combination of two seminal works in our century: Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The most important of these for our discussion is Campbell’s work and his dissection of the heroic journey, the required steps and pieces that make any story that is important to any culture. With 17 possible pieces to a story, the heroic journey will use some or all of those pieces in a standard narrative arc to show the hero’s growth and success by the end of the tale. Our modern, cinematic, Hollywood update on Campbell’s work typically includes some serious sex symbols, lame comedy, strong action sequences, and (possibly) self-discovery.

Make no mistake, we as the audience love Campbell’s formula, if only because those stories correspond so strongly to Jung’s ideas of archetypes in our world. In its purest form, we’ll even grow misty eyed and somber when discussing these, for they are as important as the religion most of us now accept: humanism. With the birth of the Internet, we celebrate the idea of collective narratives now more than ever, gasping as we become more and more the same, even as less and less time passes. It’s the supposed exponential curve of human understanding. When we deny our love for a story because it is “too formulaic”, in order to be honest we are either going to spend the rest of our discussion in the sticky topic of quality, or we are liars, denying the basic storylines that everyone in the world shares. (Or, we have really strong anti-Jung sentiments.) In short, you’re denying the importance of your own humanity in Art.

The issue is that “humanity in Art” seems almost like an anachronism when considered with any sort of Hollywood formula providing the simulacrum of Art. But just as I would never claim that the pure, volatile entertainment of Armageddon is Art, I would never suggest that something we hold as dear as our archetypes and touchstones of meaning can be found on the cutting floors of most studio editing rooms. The battle to equal the two by the mind-numbing properties of purely passive entertainment has forgotten the growth and the self-awareness of an audience in its creative endeavor. To be merely pleased is to be never satisfied. And to accept never being satisfied is to forget our own artistic teleology as a member of humanity, and we’re left with the echo of nothing (which, I suppose, could be rather effective koan, but that’s not the point).

So, when Kung Fu Panda 2 only included more of the possible pieces of this story, why did it fail where its simpler predecessor had succeeded? The only place I can find an answer is in my respect for the foundation of spirituality upon which the story rests, in both the original and the sequel. It’s lack of quality lies in its betrayal of its own spirituality, in the humanity we have projected upon it.

Let’s take the basic notion of Zen and our respect for its simplicity: Kung Fu Panda was so deceptively simple in its story and characters that its structure could be appropriately considered a bonsai tree. In the original, this anchor works; the spirituality and Eastern sentiments are as elegant and powerful as Oogway, a tortoise that you have no problem equaling to a wizened and enlightened Buddhist abbot. However, in the sequel, the spirituality is set with a glib two-minute plot device from Shifu to Po: “find inner peace”. As far as Zen goes, this is about the most anti-Zen statement from an enlightened being you’ll ever find. It is at this point, when the film sacrifices its integrity, when it loses the steady weight of the original, that it spends the next hour chasing after it in absurdly awesome action scenes, too much humor, too much tongue-in-cheek dialogue. It no longer belongs in the story of Po; we own a bonsai tree decorated heavily for Christmas.

I want the simplicity of Kung Fu Panda back. I want the action of a messenger’s single feather to unleash consequences like a maddeningly perfect Pachinko machine, the ball’s path decided like the inner peace of a water droplet. For the audience to accept Zen as the inner working of this story, we need it to align with our own reverence and understanding of the work that both Campbell and Jung produced. We need that formula to assume the same level of supernatural that we have given story structure. Kung Fu Panda 2, in its attempts to entertain and woo us Hollywood style, has forgotten this underlying mandate. Without being true to itself, to Po’s story, and to the calm of Zen, all the rest falls apart, shattered by the cannonball of modernity, which of course is the exact fate that Po is fighting against, even as his very storyline embraces it.

Formula works perfectly when the story is honest with itself and uses the structure of a hero’s journey with integrity. But Kung Fu Panda 2 has been transplanted from its simple origins in a rock garden and been told to bloom and get a tan in the studio lots of Hollywood. And when you say that I’ve gone too far, that this movie doesn’t deserve this kind of analysis, that it’s just a kid’s film, replace the words “inner peace” with “opening weekend profit” and maybe you’ll understand why I think it does.

Edward Montgomery tumbls here.