Kung Fu Panda 2

The original Kung Fu Panda was a fairly solid and fairly typical Dreamworks Animation film: stellar voice cast (Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen and Jackie Chan); well done animation (although not up to PIxar standards) and an entertaining story mixing humour and action. It screamed competence rather than inspiration, it was a decent second rate effort that failed to match Pixar or even Dreamworks own best efforts (the original Shrek or How to Train Your Dragon).

Hardly surprisingly, Kung Fu Panda 2 gives us more of the same - the voice cast gets more stellar (Gary Oldman on villain duties; Michelle Yeoh and even Jean-Claude Van Damme!). The animation remains attractive and effective and there are some nice touches in  mixing in different styles of animation for the flashback sequences. It has some funny moments and some decent action, without ever being truly hilarious or emotionally engaging.

The story, having sorted out Black's Po at the end of the last film, has to un-sort him to give him a new character arc (or rather the same arc repeated). To do this, they fall back on the old-hat daddy issues. Although, to be fair, this does knowingly play on one of the most perplexing aspects of the first film - how a panda has a goose for a dad. On the positive side, Oldman is a delight, hamming it up to great effect as the villainous Lord Shen and the interplay between him and Michelle Yeoh's soothsayer goat is one of the strongest aspects of the film. The rest is never less than entertaining, but never much more either. And it loses marks for the shameless link to a possible third film in the final scene.

Overall - 6.5/10  Solidly competent with a few nice touches.