第1个回答 2012-04-21
After a series of animated features ranging from dull to dismal (the Shrek series, Madagascar, Flushed Away, etc.), Dreamworks cooks up their first good film since Antz (1998). Additionally, Kung Fu Panda puts most other recent action movies to shame with its astonishingly beautiful, fluid, fast, clean use of movement and space. It's truly dazzling. The story isn't anything special: Po (voiced by Jack Black) works with his father in a noodle shop but dreams of being a martial arts star like the famed Furious Five. The Five consist of: Crane (voiced by David Cross), Mantis (voiced by Seth Rogen), Viper (voiced by Lucy Liu), Monkey (voiced by Jackie Chan) and the brooding Tigress (voiced by Angelina Jolie). Their master is the diminutive, but potent Shifu (voiced by Dustin Hoffman). The time has come for Shifu's master, Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), to choose the Dragon Warrior, but instead of selecting one of these highly trained stars, he somehow chooses the buffoonish, overeating Po. Even worse, the very powerful, very evil Tai Lung (Ian McShane) has just escaped prison and is coming to snatch the secret Dragon Scroll. Along the way, Po must learn to be himself, etc. The film attempts some harmless jokes from time to time, and some of them are worth a grin, if not an all-out chuckle. (Happily, there are very few crude jokes.) That's all well and good, but it's thrilling to watch this film move with such grace and energy. Having just viewed the poor Quantum of Solace a few weeks ago, this achievement seems even more miraculous. I wish the makers of that film had seen this one in advance for some useful pointers.
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At once fuzzy-wuzzy and industrial strength, the tacky-sounding “Kung Fu Panda” is high concept with a heart. Even better, this animated feature from DreamWorks is so consistently diverting and visually arresting that it succeeds in transcending its storybook clichés. The tale has the consistency of baby pablum — it’s nutritious and easy on the gums — but there’s enough beauty and pictorial wit here from opening to end credits, enough feeling for the art and for the freedom of animation, that you may not care.
The panda of the title is Po, a generously proportioned mound of roly-poly black-and-white fun voiced with gratifying restraint by Jack Black. You know the next turn in the road as well as any Disney-and-Pixar-weaned 7-year-old: Po is different, Po has a dream, Po has to struggle and so forth. Po also has a loving father, naturally (and no mother, predictably), a loosey-necked goosey, Mr. Ping (James Hong), who runs a noodle shop that he hopes his son will take over one day. Po’s unlikely passion for kung fu intervenes, leading him out of the noodle shop and into the metaphoric hot pot, whereupon he kicks, grunts and groans toward his destiny amid the usual clutter of colorful sidekicks and one nasty foe (Ian McShane, grrr).
For an ostensible outsider, Po conforms very much to familiar animated-movie type. Like Nemo and the rest of his cartoon brethren, he needs to embark on the hero’s journey, which he does with help from a miscellany of pals voiced by the usual A- and B-listers. Among those nudging and guiding Po is Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), an ancient turtle with a mellifluous voice and long, liquid neck who, um, invented kung fu and now serves as the spiritual adviser (Yoda) to an elite squad, including a kung fu master, the mustachioed red panda Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), and his students, the Furious Five: Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Viper (Lucy Liu), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Crane (David Cross) and Mantis (Seth Rogen).
The screenplay by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger is ho-hum without being insulting, a grab bag of gentle jokes, sage lectures, helpful lessons and kicky fights. There is none of the self-conscious knowing that characterizes the Pixar factory, which makes the whole thing seem either winningly innocent or terribly cynical, depending on your mood and worldview. I’ll go with innocent, at least on first viewing, because while “Kung Fu Panda” is certainly very safe, its underlying sweetness feels more genuine than not. The Ayn Randesque bottom line of Pixar’s “Incredibles” can be difficult to argue with — namely, if everybody is special, no one is — but the heroic outsider has his own durable appeal, particularly if he’s a great big bouncing ball of fat and fuzz.
That outsider is even more irresistible when nestled amid so much lovingly created animation, both computer generated and hand drawn. The main story, executed via 3-D animation (all done on computers) and directed by John Stevenson and Mark Osborne, fluidly integrates gorgeous, impressionistic flourishes with the kind of hyper-real details one has come to expect from computer-generated imagery: photorealistically textured stone steps, for instance, and fur so invitingly tactile you want to run your fingers through it. One of the pleasures of “Kung Fu Panda” is that instead of trying to mimic the entirety of the world as it exists, it uses the touch of the real. The character designs may be anatomically correct, but they’re cartoons from whisker to tail.
In the end, what charms the most about “Kung Fu Panda” is that it doesn’t feel as if it’s trying to be a live-action film. It’s an animation through and through, starting with the stunningly beautiful opening dream sequence, a graphically bold hand-drawn interlude rendered by James Baxter that looks like an animated woodblock print with slashes of black and swaths of oxblood red. This opener is so striking and so visually different from most mainstream American animations that it takes a while to settle into the more visually familiar look of the rest of the movie. And while nothing that comes afterward really compares to it, a volley of arrows that falls down like red rain and a delicate swirl of pink petals come delightfully close.