Kung Fu Panda

Kung Fu Panda

Don't you love how Jack Black actually looks vaguely like the panda? A very cute, albeit slightly empty movie. They kindly reminded us that you don't need a magical potion or a special ingredient to be great, which just brings me back to all those inspirational posters that hung in my fourth grade classroom. "Believe in yourself and you will succeed," they would say in big, bright letters. This movie was basically like that. A happy little pep talk for the slightly lazy amongst us, Kung Fu Panda calms our fears by saying, "Don't worry. As long as you're sufficiently motivated by food, anything is possible!"

Now, I don't want to mislead anyone into believing that I need my movies to have meaning, because I really don't. I like mindless entertainment, especially when it involves cute animals. I did have a few misgivings about this film, however. I wish that more animals could have had awesome names like Master Oogway (meaning "turtle" in Mandarin). I also had hoped that Angelina's... I mean Tigress' complex about her lack of fatherly love as a kid could have been resolved, but I guess they didn't have time to do the full psychoanalysis within their 92 minute time frame.

All-in-all, a fun little movie, and not really much less satisfying than, say, Milk. Except I could actually connect with the main character here, since I too can only be bothered to climb to high places in search of cookies. :-P

Nominated for an Oscar in the Animated Feature category, where it paled in comparison to Wall-E. But then again, so would most films.