I finally got around to seeing Kung Fu Panda 3 yesterday, and I have a few things I would like to say about it. Kung Fu Panda 3 isn’t an altogether terrible movie. It still does not compare well to either of the first two installments, but there are still surprisingly good moments.
In the Spirit Realm, Kai, the old rival of Master Oogway, has taken the chi or spirit energy of the great Kung Fu masters who have passed on. He returns to the mortal world to continue to take chi from the kung fu heroes who are still living. At the same time, Po is being promoted to a teacher over the Furious Five, but there isn’t really much he can teach them. At the same time, his birth father Li Shan has arrived. In face of the threat from Kai, Li offers to take Po to a secret panda village in the mountains to study the power of chi.
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| ihdwallpapers |
It seems like Po’s journey across the three films is just a never-ending identity crisis and you wonder why it wasn’t resolved with the first one, but with each installment you learn something new and fascinating so it’s palatable. In Kung Fu Panda 3, chi is what makes an individual special: you don’t need to be something you are not, but you need to embrace your true potential. In the film they call it “you becoming more you.” There are a lot of ways this can be interpreted, but it came across to me as embracing your Divine nature and potential as a child of God.
Po learns, furthermore, that a true teacher teaches other people to use and strengthen their own talents and use them to a greater purpose. The pandas at the panda village have a lot of recreational talents and hobbies like slingshot hammocks and knee-kicks and rolling down hills. Po comes to the panda village to embrace his inner panda but finds out that kung fu is his strength. But as a teacher, he puts the strengths of the other pandas to use to mount a defense of the village, and it’s very satisfying to watch. And this aids each of his friends, including his adoptive goose father, to use their chi to aid Po in his fight against Kai.
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| comicmix |
Compared to the first two Kung Fu Panda movies, this one doesn’t do as well balancing the battle sequences with the corny humor. The animation relies a lot on montages and spliced screens to tell the story, and the first half of the movie is especially choppy. A lot of the moments that should have been serious in the first half were ruined with Po’s rude behavior. Kai’s jade zombies or “jombies” was actually a good gag for this film. Some of the fight sequences were either too over-the-top or fell flat.
But like I said earlier, it was all building up to a point, so there was a little bit of a payoff. Po’s first battle with Kai was actually pretty good. But Po talking to his birth father about his mother was appropriately serious, and then the part where Po gets mad at Li and goes to vent his anger on a homemade dummy gave his character some pathos. The journeys back and forth from the spirit world reminded me of some mythology I have studied from various cultures, but I am not familiar with Chinese legends so I couldn’t tell you how much this film was pulling from that.
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| trailers.apple.com |
We did get to see a bit of a conflict between Po’s two dads but after they made up I think their being on better terms was overdone. I could go so far as to say that Po having two dads was a subtle activist plug, but it wasn’t really that subtle.
I really don’t know how the studio could justify further installments of the Kung Fu Panda series. There is an opening for Po to have a possible love interest with the ribbon-dancing panda Mei Mei, and I would be okay with that since she actually seems kind of cool.
My real takeaway from this movie: I want to do a Tigress cosplay.
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| dreamworks.com |
