Against The Hype

It is telling that Pixar’s least-discussed movies, A Bug’s Life and Cars, are the only two in its oeuvre completely divested of the presence of humans. Or, to be precise, bug species and car models provide visually striking designs for otherwise totally human personalities in these two movies: a typical strategy of American animation to enliven its stories. At its most distinctive, though, Pixar is a stalwart champion of anthropomorphised “others” whose gains we take for granted (toys, supermen, ornamental fish, rubbish compactors) or whom we treat with disdain (rats, old grumps, bedside monsters). The studio’s preferred medium of CGI is the ideal conduit for this reversed perspective: more uncanny and spatial than traditional 2D, yet brighter and more fantastical than live-action—as though we’re seeing our world heightened in another’s eyes. By aligning our empathies with its protagonists against the onscreen humans who mistreat them, Pixar’s narratives stoke a wondrously complicated guilt rarely seen in other family films—and nowhere have they demonstrated this better than with Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles.

Toy Story 2 stands alone in its status as an animated sequel—a label whose history is rife with profiteering and artistic bankruptcy—by being needlessly, absurdly good. It’s hard to realise that the movie was once relegated for direct-to-video release when one observes how cannily the final feature is put together, as its own movie and as a follow-up to its groundbreaking predecessor. Buzz Lightyear’s exhilarating flight through outer space doesn’t just provide a kinetic, adrenalin-pumping opener for Toy Story 2, it also throws a curveball to Pixar fans with its obvious discontinuity from the “realism” of Toy Story. Sure, at the end of this sequence, we’re reassured that Toy Story 2 hasn’t completely abandoned the thrust of what made the first movie such a poignant keeper (and no, it’s not just “all a dream”). But we’re also primed for a sequel that doesn’t look to its predecessor as an excuse or crutch to limit the adventurousness of its narrative, but as a springboard for its own wild, unfettered marvels.

Now that Buzz no longer thinks he is an actual space ranger, a delusion that drove his narrative arc in the first movie, Toy Story 2 jettisons any existential crises related with “not being real”. The movie thus frees itself to more fully develop the most powerful theme in the series’ arsenal: the much “realer” fear of being left behind. It’s a fear that we can all identify with, but it’s a plight that is especially inherent to being a toy, making the generic title Toy Story such an apt one. If the first Toy Story falters, then, it is that it confines most of our empathy to the character of Woody, a cocky cowboy doll whose place as his owner’s favourite toy is usurped by Buzz. When it isn’t Woody’s jealousy at Buzz that’s propelling the narrative, it’s his desperation to alleviate his fellow toys’ mistrust. Or his fear that he may never find his way home. Or his terror at a sadistic kid’s idea of fun. The movie keeps itself in Woody’s orbit at the expense of everyone else, though to be fair, Tom Hanks’ affable voice and the immediacy of Woody’s situation conspire to make him seem less dangerously self-centred than he is. Nonetheless, we have all the more to celebrate that Toy Story 2 breaks free from its predecessor’s containing gesture, extending the stakes of abandonment to include a generous number of other toys.

Ironically, we’re alerted that Woody has grown up only after his owner Andy swiftly abandons him to a dusty shelf before leaving for camp, reigniting his former fears. After a hilariously surreal nightmare, Woody wakes up (quite literally) to the notion that his fate is nowhere as jeopardised as those of the toys who don’t share his owner’s favour. Even in Andy’s absence, his mom pointedly doesn’t add Woody to her pickings for a junkyard sale (a scrawled “25¢” is the sly insulting detail in this scene), but in an unforeseen act of gallantry, Woody initiates a rescue mission for the toys that she has. This quickly goes awry, leaving Woody stranded a long way from home once more. Unlike the first movie, though, his story from there doesn’t boil down to a simple “get back to Andy!” motive, coupled with diverting obstacles along the way. Not that Toy Story 2 abandons the pleasures of such a narrative: it twines in a parallel action plot requiring Woody’s peers to navigate the harsh territory of a toy megastore, a capitalist satire populated with ever-smiling Barbies, still-deluded Buzz Lightyears, and the treachery of gaming guides and automatic doors.

But the major plot of Toy Story 2 turns on an empathic dilemma, not on physical shenanigans. When Woody finds himself with a trio of spin-off toys from his merchandised TV series, he is saddled with deciding the fate of a community to which he never knew he belonged. What continually amazes me is how deeply the stakes change—from being usurped to being forgotten entirely, and then into a choice between ephemeral bliss or a lifetime of compromised happiness—even as Woody remains in the same room throughout. For all its visual wonders, Toy Story 2 hinges ultimately on its rhetorical power, in two heartbreaking songs (the nostalgic elegies “When She Loved Me” and “You’ve Got A Friend in Me”) and in the specific histories evoked by Buzz, to events of the previous movie; and by these new characters, to their own identifiable offscreen troubles. Given that each side has a point, Woody’s eventual decision is deeply satisfying, which is why the curt end he deals to one antagonist may come off as more puerile than it deserves to be—a notable lapse in the movie’s otherwise-gratifying maturity.

Narrative ingenuity aside, Toy Story 2 sparks to its own immaculate construction, boasting some of the most jocular, attention-calling scene transitions this side of Citizen Kane: an American flag billowing behind a stump-speechmaker, an offhand order to “use your head!”, etc. The movie operates on the kind of delirious logic where a minefield of Cheetos looms wider than a four-lane street in busy traffic; where drivers swerve to obey traffic cones; where a plane lands on a runway after the last one barely left it; or where, in more targeted allusions, characters are disarmed swiftly by parental revelations (Star Wars) or camera flashes (Rear Window). Screw Tarantino or Dante! Here John Lasseter presents us movie-moviedom at its finest, in which our heroes are powered by the forces of entertainment, and the laws by which their universe runs are not only informed, but dictated by the movements of earlier classics. (Even when the movement is that of a gurgling belly, at its funniest here since Chaplin’s Modern Times.) And if its heaps of wit and feeling are to be any indication, Toy Story 2 can stand proudly aside these classics as one of the best that cinema has to offer.

Five years later, The Incredibles heralded the arrival of Brad Bird to Pixar, and with him, its first human protagonists. The complication is that these are superhumans, whose undeniable talent is both celebrated and envied, ultimately leading to a backlash against their public existence. However, the unique fascination of The Incredibles lies not in its themes of a superhero’s career-juggling burdens (a path trodden that same year by Spider-Man 2), the public suspicion of abnormal beings (the domain of the X-Men films), or the malaise of talented crimefighters forced into retirement (criticised by some as “Watchmen-lite”, a nod to the heavier proceedings of Alan Moore’s influential graphic novel). Rather, The Incredibles stands out in its complex braiding of these themes into its distinctive mix of family and superheroics. As I use it here, “family” refers to the all-American nuclear family, an idiom used in The Incredibles to revitalise the tropes of both the superhero action flick and the dysfunctional family dramedy, forming the meat of this movie’s pathos and humour.

Even the superpowers dealt to each family member seems to fit the idiom: Dad is strong, Mom is flexible, the son is brash, and the daughter self-effacing. Despite my attempt to be catchy in the previous sentence, though, I find that the labels I’ve used inaccurately reduce these characters to their roles as parents and children. For one, Bob Parr (aka Mr Incredible) can barely be said to demand the title of “Dad”, at least early on. After his feats in the movie’s prologue, we find him fifteen years later cramped—behind a desk, inside a car, within a frustratingly impotent job—and then distracted at the dinner table, where he all but ignores his family, scanning the papers for ex-superhero news before abandoning them for “bowling night”. “Mom” does suit Helen (née Elastigirl) better in the post-prologue, where we find her as a housewife, washing the baby at the sink, visiting the principal’s office, fetching the kids. But the spectre of Helen’s proto-feminist past (“Leave the saving of the world to the men? I don’t think so!”) haunts and complicates this reading considerably—and I’ll have more to say about this later. Meanwhile, the kids struggle with their own gender-ascribed troubles, with Dash frustrated that he can’t flaunt his talent at running, and Violet sneaking glances at the boy of her affections while (literally) invisible.

The Incredibles devotes a good deal of its running time hence to winking at this farce, which would serve as generic fare for a suburban drama except that this isn’t one. Really, what adds a thrill to the sibling rivalries and the couple arguments is precisely that we’ve seen them before, save that they’ve never before included the visual spectacle of a family entangled around a dining table or an enraged housewife’s head stretching for the ceiling. Likewise, Bob’s “bowling nights” and “business trips” are all a sham, lent new meaning because his indulgences lie in action sequences. But what’s less observed about The Incredibles is that the reverse is also true. The tropes of the superhero movie offers a sheen of invulnerability to these characters that, at its keenest, the movie strips away by pointing out that this is a family. I’m thinking here of the moment when Helen and the kids, while on a plane, find themselves pursued by a bunch of heat-seeking missiles. We’re so caught up by the immediate thrills of this setup, with Helen executing maneuvers while the kids tumble about the swerving plane, that it’s a rude shock when Helen yells over the air: “Abort, abort, there are children aboard!” We’ve been put on by the verve of the editing, the genre’s tropes and the gloss of the animation, and so the best parts of The Incredibles are suffused with the urgency of Helen’s voice here, punching through all that surface to remind us that real human lives—and relationships—are at stake.

Among the Incredibles, then, Helen’s arc is to me the most interesting, not least because she’s the character most saddled with taking care of everyone else, while also being most at ease with hiding her own powers. In a way, she has it easy: as a housewife, she isn’t as burdened with holding her powers back in public, as Bob and Dash are behind their desks. It’s a believable subtext to me that Helen is keeping them both from any job or sport that could even use a measure of their physical prowess, since they might be prone to showing it off. But Helen’s problem is that she is almost too adaptable, making it seem that she has compromised little even when she reduces the range of her elastic arms to the furthest reaches of the living-room carpet.

Her take on post-superhero life can be contrasted with that of Edna Mode, Helen’s erstwhile costume designer. While it is implied that—like Helen—Edna is still free to use her talents in her new field, she thrills more obviously at the functionality of her craftsmanship, both in her legendary “no capes!” monologue and in her gleeful private showcase to Helen of her new costumes. More importantly, she talks circles around Bob and Helen to get them (and the children) to fully reclaim their identities as supers. She maneuvers Bob into “convincing” her to create a new suit for him, which means that he isn’t just “re-living the glory days” but pursuing himself anew. She refuses to acknowledge Helen on the phone until the latter identifies herself as Elastigirl. She insists that Helen show up at her place (for the costume showcase, although she doesn’t reveal that yet) without leaving her any room to stammer her hesistant replies. She awakens Helen to the fact that Bob may not be doing what Helen has convinced herself he is doing, and then offers Helen the means to lead her to him. She gets indignant when Helen weeps like a hapless housewife, thwacking her and telling her to buck up and take Bob back. And she creates costumes for the children (and, it is implied, insists that Helen take them), despite Helen’s reluctance to let the kids have them, thus creating opportunities for the kids to find out for themselves and claim their super-identities as well. Voiced by Brad Bird himself, Edna thus represents The Incredibles’ guide into a new realm of possibilities.

Just as, I might add, The Incredibles represents Pixar’s own guide into a new realm of possibilities. The movie so richly unfolds the novelistic implications of its premise that, even as it draws to a close, we’re still left with plenty of questions unanswered. Can Violet be distilled into her arc from shy waif to confident girl, and how exactly will her particular way of not “being normal” affect her romantic prospects? Surely Dash can’t be content with confusing his way through every race, but is there even to be a proper answer for him? What future does this portend for their mutual sibling, who has yet to discover his own potential? And what of side characters like the villain’s assistant, whose powers we realise we haven’t even seen? As Nick Davis points out, the movie ends on its own tantalising question, as threats to “declare war on peace and happiness!” are overlaid onto images of the Incredibles reclaiming their masked identity. The Incredibles, then, is the one movie out of Pixar’s oeuvre to which I most want to see a sequel, but it’s also the movie that poses its own greatest challenge to such a possibility, layering on the heights of visual and sonic pizzazz as well as newly enlivened depths of feeling. And, unfortunately, this is not a challenge that I’m sure Pixar can achieve.

For what are we to make of Pixar’s current status, another five years since its last creative peak? For me, Pixar’s four features since The Incredibles have been disappointing efforts by its stable of auteurs, each of whom handed in superior contributions during the studio’s impressive streak: Cars, widely acknowledged to be Pixar’s first dud, was nowhere in the realm of John Lasseter’s Toy Story movies; while Ratatouille, reprising Brad Bird’s theme of unappreciated talent from The Incredibles, paired it this time around with an unconvincing “Anyone Can Cook!” thesis that one character (an easily-unconvinced critic, no less!) had to apologise for in the last reel—not to forget how it loses with Colette the ground that Edna and Helen so valiantly fought for on the women’s front. And allow me this honesty, but Andrew Stanton’s WALL•E never gives its title character any real hurdles to surmount, compared to the palpable danger his protagonists feel in Finding Nemo; while Pete Docter’s Up, despite a few touching moments between its elderly hero and his late wife, never builds a convincing relationship between any of its other characters as enduring as the one in Monsters, Inc between Sully and Boo.

It appears to me that Pixar no longer has the creative discipline to marshall its pool of admittedly-wondrous elements into fully cohesive stories, whether we can attribute this to its full ownership by Disney, its unrivalled artistic freedom as a studio or its lack of new blood since Bird joined the team. Up, touted by some as its most mature movie, strikes me instead as its most infantile yet. Consider an aspect as seemingly tiny as the way it treats its dogs—which, if you’ve followed my argument about sidelined characters, may be the most telling detail of the quality of a Pixar movie. Is it at all hard to decide if the gleeful retriever and the pinched Doberman are meant to be anything other than “good” and “evil” respectively, especially with the choice of species? And is the tinny squeak that the latter’s malfunctioning “voice” often segues into meant to elicit any emotion other than mean-spirited laughter?

As a contrast, I contend that the most hard-hitting part of Up is not the much-heralded montage showing Carl’s relationship with his wife up to her death, but a moment that comes after: when his mailbox, a memento of his late wife, is knocked over by a construction vehicle, Carl rushes to protect it from the well-meaning construction worker who steps up to fix it. In the ensuing struggle, Carl thwacks the worker on the head with his cane, and an unforeseeable thing happens: the worker starts to bleed. In my mind, there’s nothing in the movie that comes close to this moment, as poignant as the best bits of Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles, when we’re swung around to the other person’s perspective, even for just a while. If Pixar could reclaim its gift for shaping these moments consistently through a movie, in next year’s Toy Story 3, in the potential The Incredibles 2, or simply in any of its features to come—then I, for one, can’t wait to be there. But if it doesn’t, then at least it will have made two unimpeachable gems, if only to shame all the rest.

This piece also doubled as an entry for Pixar Week over at The House Next Door. For more critical analyses of Pixar’s work, please head over there and have a look!

Toy Story 2 | 1999 | USA | Director: John Lasseter, Ash Brannon, Lee Unkrich | Screenplay: John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Ash Brannon, Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin, Chris Webb| Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Wayne Knight

The Incredibles | 2004 | USA | Director: Brad Bird | Screenplay: Brad Bird | Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Spencer Fox, Sarah Vowell, Jason Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Elizabeth Peña, Brad Bird

Like last year’s Oscar-winning Departures, Tokyo Sonata kicks off with its leading man’s abrupt dismissal from his job. The recession has clearly gotten worse since then: where the earlier movie proceeded to thrust him into the bewildering reaches of the embalming business, Tokyo Sonata offers up nothing to leaven its protagonist’s similar desperation to keep up appearances to his housewife. Well-shot, well-rehearsed images of the jobless’ indignities (stuffy unemployment lines, merciless interviewers, grubby leftover jobs, etc.) are the stock of this technically proficient study of one dysfunctional family as a microcosm of urban malaise in modern Japan.

In its screenwriting, the movie resembles an Eastern take on both Little Miss Sunshine, with each character seeming to embody his respective cue card (the long-suffering wife, the iconoclastic elder son, the ambitious younger son); and a Paul Haggis film, in which every ambient event contrives to reflect its protagonist’s troubles. In a more benign instance, as the newly unemployed Ryûhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) ambles into a plaza, a passing couple amp up their conversation about visiting the “Hello Work” career centre before it is too late. At its weirdest, a desperate robber breaks into Sasaki’s house and holds his wife Megumi (Kyôko Koizumi) hostage, a late-arriving twist that threatens to derail the movie altogether.

Near the film’s midpoint, though, the movie almost promises to liberate Megumi from cliché, shifting our perspective of her to that of an adept, resilient woman who accommodates each of her family members’ dreams and insecurities better than her husband can. But the screenwriters prefer to leave redemption to the hands of fate—their hands, to be exact—and so each member has to push themselves to the end of their respective tethers, before chance mercies can show them that home is where they belong. Aww. The movie’s last scene is a literal sonata, kept in a mercifully gimmick-free long shot, until the lingering on the empty stage and awed full-house audience hammers in exactly how the movie wants us to view it as well.

Tokyo Sonata | 2008 | Japan | Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa| Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Max Mannix, Sachiko Tanaka| Cast: Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyôko Koizumi, Yû Koyanagi, Inowaki Kai, Haruka Igawa, Kanji Tsuda, Kazuya Kojima, Kôji Yakusho

For such a glorious time, Departures succeeds in being, at turns, a screwball comedy about a cellist thrust into the embalming business after his orchestra goes bust (Masahiro Motoki, who plies his movie with a hilarious physicality), and a faux-documentary about the intricacies, nobilities and pathos of the embalming ceremony and its bereaved spectators—that it lets us down whenever the more obvious narrative or “artistic” cues rear their head, as when various characters seem primed to have their opinions changed about the respectability of our hero’s profession, when the movie throws in random shots of him plying his cello atop the rolling hills, or when a few elderly characters seem just a little too important for their own good…

Departures | 2008 | Japan | Director: Yôjirô Takita| Screenplay: Kundo Koyama| Cast: Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ryoko Hirosue, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Kimiko Yo, Takashi Sasano

There’s a growing consensus that Zack Snyder’s movie adaptation of Watchmen is faithful to a fault, but it’s closer to say that the movie is faulty to the faithful. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ magisterial graphic novel poses a catch-22 to any would-be adapters: the nearer one hews to the source material, the farther one gets from matching its radical, far-reaching influences. We live in a post-Watchmen world, where cinema and the superhero genre have adopted so many of Moore’s originalities as their own that an adaptation that merely animates the novel’s plot and visuals at 24 frames per second will contribute nothing, save for an end to that pent-up potential with which the idea of a Watchmen movie has been ever anticipated. To that end, Snyder’s Watchmen is the definitive Hollywood adaptation, hell-bent on destroying all that Moore’s novel had stood for, while amping up its own lurid pleasures—and (fan)boy, does it succeed.

Let us dispense first with the myth of Snyder’s “faithfulness”. His slavish reproduction of the novel’s images is nearly as flattering to Moore and Gibbons as the Tijuana bible of herself that a retired Wonder Woman-type keeps as a memento in Watchmen: it might be nice to be paid tribute to, but not when the alleged tribute simply reduces you to a fanboy’s wank material. Audiences who think that this is somehow a “straight” or “literal” adaptation of the novel aren’t paying enough attention. In the novel, while waiting in a food line, the sociopath Rorschach defends himself by scalding his attacker’s face with a nearby pan of hot frying fat. In this movie, Rorschach has already taken down the attacker with his bare fists before he proceeds to smash a now-existent glass between him and the pan, hurling its contents into the felled man’s face. This is more work for Rorschach than before, not less, so the change is not some attempt to pare the novel down to movie length. It is a celebration of excess:

Violence. A brief physical combat in the novel, meant to counterpoint the emotional torture of another character, is made into its own extended point. Another fight is added for its own sake. Both are accompanied by blazing guitars.

Gore. An exceptional scene, not from the book, has Rorschach cornering an archrival in a bathroom. We’re left outside looking in, and the swinging door slices up our viewing rhythm; we catch only glimpses of Rorschach as he edges closer, closer to his prey. Cut away, the sound of a toilet flushing, and Rorschach steps into frame and out of the scene. Remarkable restraint on Snyder’s part, but the word I chose was “exceptional”, and not even then: the scene doesn’t end there, and the camera pans back to the bathroom door, so we can watch blood spill out from under it. (Duh.) As for the rest of the movie: head-cleaving, hand-severing, elbow-snapping—Snyder’s here to give, give, give.

Sex. Snyder scores “Hallelujah” to a prolonged sex scene between two Watchmen in an airship, which ejaculates fire across the night sky. It’s an emotional climax in the novel, but Snyder plays it for laughs even in the midst of making it more explicit, perhaps because that’s the only way he can defuse his own discomfort at such frankness.

Nudity. Granted, Dr Manhattan’s nudity is famous in comics, but the whole point was that he’s become so unbound by human norms that he’s nonchalant about it. Yet in the movie, Dr Manhattan’s penis is jarring, especially since Snyder doesn’t know how to handle it in any way other than as a visual punchline. He doesn’t reveal it often enough for us to get desensitized to it, so that whenever he cuts to a longer shot than usual—bam!—the eye gets distracted.

It doesn’t help that the penis in question seems bigger than it should be from the novels, which leads us to the question—given that Dr Manhattan is a god-figure in the movie—whether Snyder was being subconsciously meta.

Explosions. ‘Nuff said.

Pop music. Snyder shoehorns in the swelling trumpets of Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” over Dr Manhattan as he looms in over the sunset, disintegrating Vietcong troops in the foreground with a jab of his hand; and the strains of Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along The Watchtower” as two Watchmen navigate their airship into Antarctica, never mind the redundancy of scoring the lyrics “two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl” over a scene that shows us precisely that. The point of all this overscoring is to provide “oooh!” moments for fans who recall that Moore alluded to these songs in the book—a sort of pleasure that comes from being in on the joke.

Structurally, this is similar to the approach taken in the Harry Potter movies, another pop culture franchise with a hard-to-compress mythology. The result, too, is similar: Watchmen often feels snippy and episodic (made worse because the half-duplicated serial chapter structure focuses on each major character in turn) in its bid to retain the high points, the killer lines and classic images. When Snyder slow-mos a frame that’s the visual equivalent of yet another comic panel, then, he isn’t doing it out of some misbegotten sense of fidelity to Moore’s “vision”.

He’s doing it because it’s a money shot.

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Watchmen | 2009 | USA | Director: Zack Snyder | Screenplay: David Hayter, Alex Tse | Cast: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino

The fifteenth day of the Chinese New Year marks the first full moon of the new lunar year, symbolic of the beginning of the rest of the year, and it is a time for families to reunite and appreciate what we have. How better to kick off a movie blog than on this day, with a review of a movie from the past year that not only celebrates Chinese culture, but should have been far more appreciated by movie lovers than it was?

Last week, Kung Fu Panda received an undeserved drubbing for sweeping the 36th Annie Awards, largely because it was competing with WALL·E, which has become the pre-ordained “must love” animated flick of 2008 since it was released in the summer to critical adulation. I’m not convinced. Sure, WALL·E showed courage in dishing out Hello, Dolly! songs, a post-apocalyptic landscape, a rusty leading robot, a pet cockroach, and minimal dialogue in its first twenty minutes. But Kung Fu Panda opens just as superbly, with a gorgeously hand-drawn animated sequence and some smart counterpoint narration which are less self-consciously “courageous”. It also sustains its unflagging pace and energy, and never sacrifices its emotional and character complexity for the sake of ambitious plot turns and situations—a misstep that I feel WALL·E commits, especially as the narrative swerves aboard the AXIOM spaceship.

But that is fodder for a future post, and here I shall instead concentrate on all that is joyful (and at times disappointing) about Kung Fu Panda. If you’ve watched it, how did you feel about it? If you agree with me, or think I’m full of it, please do tell me in the comments.

Review: Kung Fu Panda

Kung Fu Panda is the kind of working title we’d expect from studio executives hoping to stretch a one-note high concept into a full-length feature. It doesn’t help that the movie bears the usual marks of a stodgy DreamWorks animation: 1) a roundup of celebrity “voice actors” who have been corralled more for their marquee names than for their vocal expressiveness; 2) a trailer with its dreadful abundance of obese humour, in turn suggesting all the jokes about bodily expulsions hiding around the corner; and 3) a half-cutesy, half-grotesque protagonist who is modelled after the celebrity persona of his voice actor, whose “comic” contributions surely involve the sort of hijinks associated with that celeb. Add a trashy sensibility of chop-socky and slapstick, a predictably archetypal tale, and the lowbrow pedigree of its animation studio, and what critics’ glass ceilings can Kung Fu Panda be reasonably expected to conquer?

Folks, here is a movie brimming with confidence from the get-go. With its bravura hand-drawn opening sequence (in a CGI movie, to boot!), we are quickly tuned into the movie’s kinetic thrills, its splendid colour palette, its keen eye for theatrics, and—best of all—its penchant for mocking the overblown pomp of those theatrics, without denying us their pleasures. Instead it strips away the guilt around these pleasures, inviting us to indulge. “Legend tells of a legendary warrior… whose kungfu skills were the stuff of legend,” enunciates Jack Black, even as his silhouetted hero strides in through the mist without a trace of visual irony, and we delight in this movie’s notion that we can both celebrate and poke fun at our grandest cinematic traditions in one fell chuckle.

Black gives voice to Po, a panda who has spent his childhood imbibing the myths of kungfu and admiring his action figures of the Furious Five, a band of five warriors who live in the mountains overlooking his village. This makes him our surrogate, we who flock to the movie theatres for heroes greater than we can ever be, and yet to whom we may still aspire. At its simplest, then, Kung Fu Panda offers a crowd-pleasing tale of wish fulfilment, as Po painstakingly climbs his way to the top (and again, and again) without any sense of self-entitlement. The movie often works Po’s humiliation for laughs, layering on the pratfalls a bit too thickly at times—although we may doubt if a particularly cruel moment truly intends to elicit our laughter, such as in a winceful scene where Po tries to salvage his humiliation by trying at being dramatic, only to have it literally fizzle out on him. Or in an early scene, which should be read differently by children and their elders, where Po tries repeatedly to flip himself out of bed, causing a ruckus, and his father calls from downstairs: “Po, what are you doing up there?… all that noise.” These scenes are often discomfiting, never mean-spirited, and we see Po persist through so many hard knocks that by the end we find it hard to begrudge him his expected triumphs.

This structuring tale of Po’s overcoming his odds can be a problem if we fail to identify with him, and his character design does admit that possibility. Po’s corpulence is used early in the movie as shorthand for why he is clumsy and easily short of breath; and his occasional indignance at biases against him, coupled with Black’s nasal voice, can be whiny and off-putting. But is this a problem of the movie’s prejudices, or our own? The movie knows how such flaws etch away at their bearer’s self-esteem, even while it acknowledges that our sympathies may never fully sync with a character who is caricatured at these outsized proportions. As a result, it goes further than most movies of its ilk to temper our reactions to Po, often dwarfing him in long shots that also capture his bumbling physicality, and transmuting comic beats into rueful ones by sustaining those shots on Po for a few seconds longer than a comedy alone might need. All this self-doubt culminates in a beautifully direct confrontation between Po and his eventual master, each tearing away at the other’s rationalisations of his self-worth, yet hoping that the other will dispel his fears, until they’re both finally stripped down to their unsettling gut beliefs, no answers in sight.

Even if the movie weren’t honed so astutely towards Po’s plight as an obese character, it offers another avenue of identification with him: in his fanatic passion for kungfu. We don’t need to have watched an action flick to know the adrenaline-laden thrills of a fight, and we all know that the heightened, expertly-placed movements are more a result of choreography than finely-honed instincts, and yet we still feel the pang in knowing that we fall short of such impossible perfection. Po’s marvelling at his encounters is thus not an alien reaction to us, and the movie forces us to be Po’s distanced companion by withholding what he (and we) desperately wants to but cannot see at an early kungfu showcase. By the time he’s spirited away to the Furious Five’s temple and left there alone, we’re complicit in his exploration of this inner sanctum, and learn from the drops of his jaw the value of the treasures we encounter within—the movie’s sneaky way of making up its own self-contained myths.

As we home in on the Furious Five, we gain the pleasure of learning how much they‘re wading neck-deep in their own mythmaking as well. Despite their grandstanding at the public ceremony where the legendary Dragon Warrior is to be chosen, once the Five have retreated to their temple they all swap jokes about the eventual pick that seem almost too puerile for such experienced fighters. Likewise, when an outsider later stumbles into one of the Five’s rooms, catching him off-guard, the warrior appears far too naked, too fatigued, too awkward, too disappointed for his supposed stature. It can be easy to understate the wisdom of Kung Fu Panda‘s choice to depict the Five as adolescents, all dramatizing to fit the myths that they’ve convinced themselves to inhabit—to be the stoic disciplined warrior, or the immovable zen master, or even just an adult—such that we have to catch ourselves from expecting the self-same illusion of them. It is to the movie’s credit that we read into the Five’s reactions not just ennobled self-righteousness, but also petulance; and when they set off on their self-assigned mission, we can sense that they’re not entirely sure of themselves, but are willing to try for what seems right. The movie shows us the age-old ideals we’ve picked up from our heroic narratives, why we love them and our impossible distance from them, and lets its youthful characters feel the weight of that gap.

But if the movie’s youths are lost and flailing, its adults are ensconced in their wisdom, which is neither too conservative nor nonsensical for us to dismiss altogether. Po’s father is a pragmatic noodle-seller who believes that “we all have a place in this world,” and that he has inherited his. The writers give him an affecting monologue, only five minutes into the movie, about once having dreamt of running away to make tofu, and his voice actor James Hong deftly lets unease creep into the half-hearted chortles with which he dismisses his nostalgia for that dream. The writers and Hong also nail the near-callous way that he assumes the foolishness of Po’s own dreams while never seeming like an unsupportive parent—Hong bouncily inflects his natterings about noodles after Po underplays his true ambitions; and few visuals are as economical as the one in which Po embraces his father, separating to find that the latter has tied an apron around his waist. Likewise, Po’s master Shifu doesn’t know what to do with a youngster except to train their kungfu by being a mean old bastard to them, often justified in the pursuit of a Dragon Warrior status that they were never meant for. And one shouldn’t think too much about how the whole chain of events would never have begun but for the needless orchestration of Shifu’s master, Wugui, in his platitudinal attitude towards the nature of fate. Let us just say that for all Wugui’s insistence that “there is no good or bad”, he is partly responsible for the application of those labels to various characters in this tale.

It’s hard to believe that an attentive viewer, however initially jaded, can hence accuse Kung Fu Panda of having no teases and rewards. Early in the movie, Shifu reveals that to become the Dragon Warrior, Po must first access a scroll suspended high from the ceiling of a massive chamber. “So how does this work, d’you have a ladder, a trampoline…?” ventures Po. Shifu laughs and replies, “You think it’s that easy, that I’m just going to hand you the secret to limitless power? One must first master the highest level of kungfu,” and of course this is a dangled promise for an upcoming action setpiece, one of the five vivid ones that we have yet to encounter at this point, that surely involves the claiming of the scroll. But the muted anticlimax of this implied thread, and how the movie later uses the setpiece instead to challenge our sentiment for the treasures Po has fawned over in it, evinces the off-kilter design that the script uses to quietly deviate from its maligned formula. That the movie doesn’t operate on wild, ambitious plot turns is no crime, not when it calibrates so perfectly its hushed surprises.

Later, another surprise involves a dejected Po admitting to his father that sometimes he can’t believe he’s his son. “Oh…” replies his father. “Po, I think it’s time I told you something I should have told you a long time ago.” We’re primed by this exchange to expect a certain answer that’s been hinted at earlier, when the panda’s father—a goose—scrolls through a hilarious sequence of portraits of his father and grandfather—also geese. But instead, Po’s father switches his revelation for a seeming nonsequitur that so neatly ties up another plot thread before cutting away, we hardly realize that he wasn’t offering a nonsequitur at all, but an oblique and far more profound answer to Po’s doubts than we might have expected. Gamely, the script takes its apparent platitude about self-confidence and flips it into an insight about how we treasure the relationships dealt to us by fate, adding a new facet to the recurring brief exchanges of who is (or is not) whose master, and making a subsequent reunion between father and son all the sweeter—but only if we are willing to sit up and look past the surface cliché.

If we do, we’d realise how utterly generous it is for the writers to bestow the movie’s only major solo action setpiece upon the villain, slowing down his bounding up a steep rock face to telegraph his sleek grace; or another setpiece upon the Furious Five that cleverly incorporates them all even after they’ve been blindsided by their lack of importance to this narrative; and a final battle upon us that reshuffles all the pieces that came before, breathing new light into them. Nothing prepares you, either, for nifty details like the visual of a turtle unfurling from his shell to reveal that he was meditating upside down atop his wooden staff, or the hilarious sound of a collective wispy moaning when Po breaks a vase “said to contain the souls of the entire Tenshu army.” After Iron Man coasted its way to a matted robot-vs-robot anticlimax, The Dark Knight was overthrown by a winner-takes-all Joker, and WALL·E lost its way aboard the AXIOM spaceship—Kung Fu Panda has, against the odds, turned out to be the sturdiest, most perennially rewarding American blockbuster of the summer of 2008.

Kung Fu Panda | 2008 | USA | Directors: Mark Osborne, John Stevenson | Screenplay: Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger | Cast: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Randall Duk Kim, James Hong