The new villain (I'll try to dance around spoilers here, but if you're dead set against them, consider yourself warned!) is a white peacock with red accents. They buy heavily into the 'metal bird' visual trope (I'm having trouble dragging up examples, but this seems familiar?); his wings hide feather-shaped throwing knives, his claws clatter satisfyingly against the ground, his tail makes an effective shield and shunting weapon (derived, I'm sure, from the folding-paper-fans school of martial arts movies), and he wields a wavy sword that he can deftly conceal in his wings. All in all, the visual design for the villain is top notch, as is his choreography. While his character and backstory are somewhat lackluster, he does have a few shining moments. In some scenes, he genuinely seems harried (he's martially inferior and aware of this) by the protagonists; he is better developed than the first movie's villain by leagues. Additionally, his backstory adds a hint that the Kung Fu Panda world has a cosmology and a civic structure and a past of brutal warfare; a short bit of exposition in the beginning serves to introduce the villain and expand the viewer's understanding of the world by a hefty amount. In this regard, the storytelling has vastly improved; opportunities are taken to hint at parts of the setting that were previously completely ignored.
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| All spines and quills... |
Speaking of the short introduction, another part of Kung Fu Panda 2 that made for a pleasant change was an increased use of stylized 2D animation. Some of it was re-used a few times, but they mostly created an (unspoken) convention where 2D animation represented the past (or a dream), and 3D animation represented the present; this convention's broken a few times, but it served to strengthen the narrative by giving the viewers some clue to help them orient themselves. The prior movie (if it had had as many flashbacks) would probably have resorted to telling the audience where in the timeline they were, with the unintended consequence of destroying suspension of disbelief (and preventing the audience from discovering the 'payoff' of making important connections on their own; more on this later).
One of my biggest complaints is the increased screentime spent in action scenes. This may just be an artifact of different expectations, or misremembering the prequel, but it seems like a larger proportion of Kung Fu Panda 2 was spent in fight scenes or chase scenes. This is especially bad when almost all of these scenes are shown up by the few with the peacock as a major actor. In particular, there's one chase scene where one of the villain's henchmen is running from the protagonists, and it turns into a gratuitously long rickshaw chase. The biggest offense that this chase scene provides is that it doesn't move the plot in any way. If the arbitrary start and end of the chase had been ten feet apart instead of a thousand feet apart, the plot would not have been impacted. The better action scenes served to vitally influence the plot or allow for dialogue between opposing characters who wouldn't otherwise interact at all or showcase the beautiful character design of the peacock. The rickshaw chase, however, did none of these things.
One subset of the rickshaw chase also serves to highlight a point that I think Kung Fu Panda 2 illustrates; the self-imposed "kid friendly" nature of the movie limits the ways it can approach a wealth of topics. For example, there's an event alluded to in flashbacks that is very grim, and I feel like the writers handled that particular event fairly well by doing nothing more than alluding. The audience is left to formulate their opinions of what happened from a few fragments of memory; while it seems fairly obvious what probably happened, the writers throw a curve ball at the end (get back to this in a moment!). However, during this rickshaw chase, a handful of little babies end up in a basket in midair over the street, impeding the protagonists' progress. A chunk of screentime was billed for this, but not for a moment did I feel like the babies were in peril; this was a movie for kids; I didn't even have an attachment to these characters. I understand that the authors were probably trying to inject some tension into the situation, but it completely failed to have an effect on me, especially as the chase itself felt asinine.
And then there was the ending. If you haven't seen the movie yet and plan to, now would be a good place to stop; spoilers incoming. The ending is bad on many levels. It takes the narrative that's just been told and trivializes it by presenting it as just a lead-in to the next segment. The presence of so many pandas leaves the audience wondering if maybe their presuppositions about Shen and the wolves were wrong, and maybe, instead of slaughtering the pandas wholesale, they had merely lit their houses on fire to keep them warm and helped them to go running in preparation for the upcoming marathon. The final line, delivered by the panda we are to assume is Po's father, leaves the audience bewildered: What does he know? How? What?!
At the core of why these particular questions are bad is a feeling of helpless uncertainty. Earlier, Shen's evilness was assured; the audience was confident that they understood his actions and motivation. While it would have been interesting for the writers to have flipped Shen around at the last moment and presented him as a misunderstood hero (perhaps by filling in with what really happened to the pandas), the questions presented by the ending are posed in a vacuum - there is no 'reasonable' answer, because there's not enough substance to build one on. The audience flounders and admits defeat, and the writers haven't penned themselves into a specific manner of approaching the sequel. And it's completely unsatisfying because the audience is absolutely dependent on the writers to produce a sequel that gives closure to the story as it's already been told.
-Ashton
Aside: Tigress, however, received a lot of work and is really starting to come together as a character. Unfortunately, this leaves the rest of the cast in even worse shape, as they appear more caricature-esque alongside her. But hey, at least I now have a character to root for.
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