Kung Fu Panda

Since the first Shrek movie, Dreamworks Animation have been struggling through adequate movies which fail to even get close to the quality of rivals Pixar. Kung Fu Panda, encouragingly is one of their better efforts. That said, it rarely even gets close to being good enough to be in the shadow of even lesser Pixar efforts like Cars or Ratatouille.

Once again they've attracted a truly stellar vocal cast (Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen, Ian McShane, Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu) for this tale of a noodle selling panda called Po (Jack Black) who dreams of being a kung fu master and has his dream come true just in time to face off against ultra-nasty bad guy snow leopard Tai Lung (McShane).

The cast are great - McShane wonderfully nasty and Black somehow seeming typecast - the opening dream sequence is so pure Jack Black your response will depend very much on how you view the actor himself. And there are somer great moments - Tai Lung's escape from an impossible prison is visually stunning and inventive. There's a training sequence involving dumplings that's very funny and some good fight scenes, especially one on a rope bridge. There's also some nice almost tongue-in-cheek stuff with the old master.

However, overall the film lacks the sharpness in either visuals or script that we would now expect from Pixar. And (curiously like The Forbidden Kingdom (to be reviewed soon)) thew film clearly comes out of love for Kung Fu movies and gets itself stuck between homage and pastiche at times, which in this case leads to the odd straying into an unnecessary sentimentality.

Overall - 3/5 A solid rather than spectacular effort with some nice flourishes and a good cast. Better than a lot of recent non-Pixar animations, but not in the same league as the leaders in the field.