andPOP - Pop Culture With Substance

I haven’t touched a movie-based game since Spiderman: The Movie: The Game came out. I still remember beating the game and enjoying the ending, only to realize that the final cut scene was ruining the ending of the movie before the flick even came out! Ever since then I’ve sworn off movie games… that is until Kung-Fu Panda appeared in my hands. The game based on the newly released Dreamworks summer blockbuster with a laundry list of celebrities such as Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan and more (all of which are not actually voiced in the game), is adapted into an adventure for Wii, PS2, PC, Xbox360, Nintendo DS, Wireless cell phones and PS3. Basically every platform people still make games for.

You take control of Po the Panda as well as other members of the furious five to play through 13 action based levels that progress along the same storyline as the movie of the same name. What separates this title from other animated film adaptations is that Kung Fu Panda offers more than an interactive version of the game. Luxoflux Corp and Activision tried to vary up the game play as much as possible and as such, the cute furry critters get a little of that God of War type game play. Little mini games, different types of stages, action button madness and different combos are what I mean by that. On top of this, Po can have his skills, combos and even costumes upgraded by collecting coins throughout the game. Not done yet! Kung Fu Panda also offers multiplayer action in the form of mini-games of up to four players offline, unfortunately however, you can still enter into these multiplayer matches by yourself and be bored with nothing to do for 5 minutes (I was playing alone at one point and even managed to get a negative score!). To round off the additions to this adaptation, Kung Fu Panda has PLENTY of un-lockable goodies if you find enough secret green coins in the single player mode.

With all these things going for Kung Fu Panda, you might think you should stop reading now, go out and buy this game on as many platforms as possible, but read on weary gamers, read on. Even though the Panda game has features out the wazoo, it still has plenty to warrant questioning. Overall, the game is just not too fun. The game play is very repetitive (aside from the interspersed mini-games), you run, do something wacky, jump a bit, fight a group of pigs, repeat that again, then mini game, repeat step 1 again then boss. Level two is exactly the same with different items to collect and a different breed of animal to fight. It almost feels like a balance of overuse of formula to just plain lazy if you ask me. As well, the game suffers from horrible detection problems. This can be extremely frustrating when you’re playing on one of the many pond jumping stages where if you fall into the water you automatically die, luckily there aren’t a set amount of lives to worry about.

A movie with such an emphasis on the celebrity actors that portray their animated equivalent would have to bleed out to the game version, wouldn’t you think? The bad news is that this game doesn’t have any of the big name voice actors. The good news though, is that it does have pretty good imposter voice actors that sound almost exactly like their celebrity counterparts. The bad news again, while there is PLENTY of voice acting going on in this game, it gets much to repetitive quickly and to a point where Po says the same lame catchphrase every 5 minutes. Like the movie, Kung Fu Panda for PS3 utilized Dolby Digital sound for crisper audio entertainment.

Along with the God of War game play feel, the controls are also fairly similar. Light attack, strong attack, combos, dodges and special moves (like turning yourself into a big ball or doing a belly flop on the bad guys) is pretty much the majority of your controls, while rolling around or flying in a mini-game, you have the option to use the Sixaxis motion sensor ability to steer your character. I do enjoy the fact that you are given the option though, as the only thing worse than bad detection issues, are poor control options. On top of this, Kung Fu Panda is Dualshock 3 compatible for those rumbling PS3 enjoyers out there.

Kung Fu Panda is one of the most detailed, smooth, and magnificent computer animated feats I have ever seen… I’m talking about the movie. The game looks as decent as a high quality PS2 game, yet again, God of War graphics and animation fluidity come to mind. There are some great uses of lighting going on within the game and the number of frames per second never as much as hiccups, but in the end, I can’t help be expect more of a visual treat on a PS3 game, especially now since games like Grand Theft Auto 4 and Metal Gear Solid 3 are out. All these negatives aside, the game looks fun and is very colourful, it embodies the point of the movie excellently and the little details make gamers smile (I especially enjoy how Po’s tummy jiggles). There are no cut scenes in this game, no scenes directly out of the movie and no pre-rendered videos; all storytelling is done through the in-game graphics.

Over all, if you’re a fan of the movie, I would definitely recommend picking this game up, even if you get tired of the story after playing through it once, it still has 14 multiplayer modes (some of which are just fights, some of which are more interesting mini-games), upgradeable attributes, optional side quests, and even a demo of the Madagascar 2 video game! If you weren’t such a fan of Jack Black’s vocal antics or the movie as a whole, why would you think about picking up a game you didn’t enjoy what it was based on in the first place? If your considering picking up this game before seeing the movie however, DON’T. It will ruin the story and when you eventually do go to see the film, it will feel like your watching something you’ve already seen.

Graphics: 3.0 / 5.0
Game play 2.5 / 5.0
Sound 2.0 / 5.0
Replay value 4.0 / 5.0

The animated movie “Kung Fu Panda” finished on top with $60 million, estimates Exhibitor Relations Co. while Adam Sandler’s new flick, “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” came in second with $40 million.

Jack Black provides the voice for the panda, while Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu also give their vocals to the movie’s other characters.

“Kung Fu Panda” is expected to take eighth place on the list of all-time animation openers, as per stats at Box Office Mojo.

“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” came in third place with $22.8 million while last week’s box office smash hit “Sex and the City” came in fourth place with $21.3 million.

Perhaps it’s because making a kung fu movie with animals was a legitimately good idea. After all, kids love violence and by using anthropomorphic animals instead of humans the action is kept at a safe distance from reality and genre fans don’t have to cry that it’s unrealistic when it isn’t bloody.

Perhaps it’s because, like the best comedies, Kung Fu Panda takes itself seriously – there are laughs to be had, certainly, but the directors obviously wanted you to care about the characters.

For whatever reason, a good 60 percent of Kung Fu Panda doesn’t feel like a typical DreamWorks film. The medium was obviously chosen because the studio thinks 3D animation is more profitable than 2D, there are lots of stars among the voices (it’s strange that Black’s name is the only one above the title even though Dustin Hoffman, of all people, has the other leading role), and the company’s trademark snark rears its head more than once, usually after Family Guy-esque moments that go on too long, but somewhere underneath it all the film has preserved the impression its creators wanted to make a good movie.

For instance, that Lucy Liu plays one of the two female roles (a snake) goes without saying (the other, a tigress who doesn’t have breasts – congrats directors! – is played by Angelina Jolie). But next to Po (played by Black) and Shifu (Po’s sensei, a red panda played by Hoffman), the third-largest role is handed to comparatively unknown character actor Ian McShane. Shifu’s sensei, Oogway (a tortoise), is played by one Randall Duk Kim. Dan Fogler, Seth Rogen, David Cross and Jackie Chan (!?) are also among the supporting cast, but don’t leave an impression nearly as strong as McShane or Kim.

Like the recent Forbidden Kingdom, Kung Fu Panda is an American take on an Asian genre, and thus filtered through American sensibilities. This means individual heroism is emphasized over cooperation, and ambition over accepting one’s place in the world and destiny. Po may be a slob, the “chosen one” and gets winded easily, but he also collects action figures, worships the “furious five” (the kung fu masters shown in the trailer, played by Liu, Jolie, Rogen, Cross and Chan) and wishes he could be just like them, if only he could find the inner strength and wasn’t constrained by working in his father’s noodle house…

Your enjoyment of Kung Fu Panda will depend on how easily you can suspend your disbelief. If you didn’t buy The Lion King’s savannah take on Shakespeare you certainly won’t enjoy this. I wasn’t kidding when I said the movie takes itself seriously (the villain, Tai Lung, a snow leopard voiced to gravelly perfection by McShane, is easily the most threatening antagonist I’ve seen in a CG film – not that he has much competition), but it is funny; the jokes are usually character-based and move the plot along, and more likely to yield a smile or a chuckle than a laugh. By making a kung fu movie DreamWorks has basically traded their usual formula for another, but it’s at least refreshing to not deal with pop culture references, fart jokes or smart-aleck children for once (though Po still gets hit in the balls).

My only gripe with the movie, and it’s a personal one, is that I don’t think 3D animation was the right medium for it. The credits (and most likely the opening dream sequence, which I missed thanks to the TTC) are presented using traditional animation, and the characters are adapted so perfectly, and the animation is stylized just well enough to make me wish the whole movie could have been done the same way. This is what historians and animators meant when they said the medium doesn’t make a difference to box office – it’s the story. If DreamWorks’ shuttered 2D animation division, or any studio’s for that matter, had created a film like Kung Fu Panda that was engaging (unlike The Road to El Dorado), animal-based (unlike Titan A.E.), with likeable characters (unlike Sinbad), an interesting story (unlike Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron) and action that didn’t feel censored (unlike Treasure Planet) and appealed to adult sensibilities – and, most importantly, that was actually good (unlike Atlantis), it would have been poised to be just as big a hit. C’est la vie.

Animation fans know that calling Kung Fu Panda the best DreamWorks film since Shrek isn’t saying much. But on the other hand, maybe it is.

It was going to happen sometime. It had already happened once. DreamWorks’ 3D animation division made another movie (their first in seven years) that I unequivocally liked.

Part of the reason for Kung Fu Panda’s unexpected quality is directors John Stevenson and Mark Osbourne, who are each making their debut feature. Osbourne’s career began at the California Institute of the Arts, where many, MANY DreamWorks, Disney and Pixar animators have received their start, while Stevenson began his career with Jim Henson and the Muppets.

andPOP: Tell me about yourselves.

OSBOURNE: I’ve got two kids, I’m happily married, and I’ve spent the last four years of my life in a cave called Kung Fu Panda, so I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the world. My background is in stop-motion animation and independent filmmaking. I studied at CalArts. I was actually a teacher there teaching stop-motion animation and while I was at CalArts I completed a couple of short films, one of which got nominated for an Academy Award and opened a lot of doors for me, one of which was at DreamWorks. It’s called More and it’s very different kind of film from Kung Fu Panda.

andPOP: (to Stevenson) How did you end up at DreamWorks?

STEVENSON: (British accent) I started with Jim Henson and The Muppet Show many, many years ago. He was my mentor, and I sort of got into the business working with him and the Muppets.

andPOP: You were a puppeteer?

STEVENSON: No, I did some background puppeteering but I was mostly coming up with new character designs and little ideas.

andPOP: You were one of the puppet makers?

STEVENSON: I wasn’t a puppet maker, no. I was in sort of a weird little niche, where I would work in the puppet workshop. Jim would say ‘I want a tap-dancing moose for this show,’ and I would do some drawings for the moose, and if Jim said, ‘I like that,’ then the puppet builders would go ahead and build it.

OSBOURNE: And Beaker…

STEVENSON: No no no…

OSBOURNE: Why can’t I?

STEVENSON: It’s unsubstantiated myth and legend, that’s all.

OSBOURNE: Well, the myth and legend, unsubstantiated as it may be, is that Beaker was inspired by John.

STEVENSON: I was rail-thin, like a piece of asparagus with bright red hair, you wouldn’t know now because I’m so old and grey, but…

andPOP: It’s still red now.

STEVENSON: Just barely, but it was flame-red, and I was also geeky, and swotty (British slang – a person who works and studies hard), and nervous…

OSBOURNE: But how amazing is that?

STEVENSON: It’s just a myth.

OSBOURNE: “Just a myth.”

andPOP: Where did the idea for Kung Fu Panda come from? Did it originate with you, or did it come from higher up in DreamWorks?

STEVENSON: It was an idea that originated in the development department at DreamWorks, and it was something that people responded to when they heard the two things: kung fu – great, hardcore, use of athletic ability and discipline – and pandas – furry, cute. It was a great mix of two weird ideas, but it hadn’t found a voice. It was languishing in the world of parody –

OSBOURNE: It made everyone kind of chuckle, but nobody quite knew what to do with it, and when we came together we decided to reinvent the idea as an epic kung fu film, not a parody.

STEVENSON: It was going the easy route with being a parody, and we just said, “how about you take that idea, and just make it a real kung fu movie that happens to be funny, but has really cool action and looks beautiful and has great production values and all that stuff.”

andPOP: One thing that struck me about the film… the majority of DreamWorks movies, they do go that easy route, and it’s a lot more difficult to make a film that’s serious. Even with Kung Fu Panda I think the snark rears its head a bit, but for the most part it doesn’t feel like a traditional DreamWorks film in that way.

OSBOURNE: We weren’t necessarily doing it in the context of… we were more paying attention to the genre of kung fu instead of worrying about what animation is doing or what DreamWorks is doing, and so…

STEVENSON: Y’know, I think it’s true… when I grew up, the only animated films in the world were Disney films, and they were rare events in my childhood. They would come along every couple of years, if that, and the thing that was most special about them was they were always timeless stories. They would just involve that story, whether that story was Lady and the Tramp or Pinocchio, there was nothing from any other world, there was just this place that you could visit only if you went to see that film. And we wanted to go back to that more timeless story that wasn’t contaminated by anything from today’s world, that just referenced itself and had its own set of rules. And one of those rules that we laid out for ourselves, which is maybe where you mentioned the snark, was because we love Jack Black, we just said, “okay, Jack’s our oddball in this world. We allow Jack to speak in his natural, comfortable voice.” So he does use anachronistic speech patterns. Everybody else we asked to be a bit more formal in their speech patterns, so you got that kind of contrast, and hopefully, we thought, that would make it an interesting, an oral texture if you like. The other thing, a choice we made, was everybody in our movie is Chinese, whether they’re Caucasian, or African American, or Asian, so we didn’t ask anybody to put on an accent. Jack speaks like Jack, Dustin put a bit more gravel in his voice, but he’s not adopting –

OSBOURNE: He took the New Yorker out of his voice.

STEVENSON: But we have Jackie Chan and James Hong and Michael Clarke Duncan, and we just said, “you’re all Chinese, you can all speak the way you usually do. The umbrella of our world allows you to speak in your natural voice because you all come from different parts of China, that’s why you have different accents.”

OSBOURNE: I think the high concept that came out of that idea, Jack being the oddball guy, was what if Akira Kurosawa shot a Jerry Lewis movie? And that was the big idea that everyone could rally around, which is let’s make a real epic kung fu movie that looks beautiful and is amazing, but has this ridiculous character that’s bouncing around in the centre of it.

STEVENSON: Again it’s back to that thing, when it was NOT coming together as an idea at DreamWorks, one of the things was “we’re gonna make a real movie,” so a real movie for us was not this sort of comedy film look, slightly over saturated, very bright. And then there’s the sort of movies that we really like –

OSBOURNE: Which is dramatic, epic films.

STEVENSON: The cinematography in those films is very graceful, very beautiful, and we just thought it’d be interesting if you could get the laughs, but have the majesty and beauty of epic filmmaking.

andPOP: How did the characters and story change as you were working on it?

OSBOURNE: In every way.

STEVENSON: You spend four years making a movie and it’s a constantly evolving process. There’s never a finished script. The script’s a living document, because we have script writers, we have story artists, a team of about eight story artists who are also writers. They draw story ideas, but it’s a constant back-and-forth, so it totally changes, plus the choices the actors make in a recording session. Suddenly you may see something that happens in their vocal performance that makes you go, “oh! That gives us a clue!” And then you go back and you change things you’ve already done. That’s one of the good things about something that takes four years; you can revisit things. If you see that there’s a way of making it better you have the chance to back and correct it.

andPOP: Do you think CG animation was the best tool for this story?

STEVENSON: I’m guessing one of the reasons you asked is that we have a traditionally animated component to the film, which we love…

andPOP: Watching it I really, *really* wished the whole film had looked like that.

OSBOURNE: Really?

andPOP: When Disney (with Atlantis and Treasure Planet), DreamWorks (with Sinbad) and Fox (with Titan A.E.) tried courting older audiences, they never made good movies, whereas Kung Fu Panda…

OSBOURNE: I think CG is vital to our story actually because we needed the contrast of the fantastic 2D dreamworld and the reality – the weight of Po is so important, is such a key element in the story that we needed to have a grounded, realistic world that CG’s great at…

STEVENSON: That kind of defined how we did kung fu, the kung fu was the most technically challenging aspect of making the film.

andPOP: And that was easier in CG?

STEVENSON and OSBOURNE: Well, it was not easier, but –

OSBOURNE: – It was like you could actually… there was more realism to it.

STEVENSON: You had to believe gravity and physics and mass and weight, and you have all those extra clues you can get with CG because of the lighting and everything. If we did our jobs right then in all the sequences where we weren’t doing kung fu, where it’s just dialogue, if we made you believe the lighting, and we made you believe that Po did weigh 400 pounds as he moved across the room, then when we start to do those big crazy action scenes you hopefully would have that sense of mass and physics, you understand something extraordinary’s happening, whereas in 2D…

OSBOURNE: It all depends on the story, it all depends on the character, and it’s not like there’s one form of animation that’s “best” or anything, it’s all just tools for telling stories.

STEVENSON: We would love if in the future, someone did something like Kung Fu Panda that was all in traditional animation, that’d be awesome.

Comedian actor Jack Black is a dad again, after he and his wife Tanya welcomed their second child about a week ago.

The star of “Kung Fu Panda” told Entertainment Tonight that his new son was “fresh out of the oven.” Jack is said to have been changing a lot of diapers over the past week.

The baby is said to be named after his father and is joined by big brother Samuel, who is almost 2. Black and his wife married in 2006.

About two weeks, Black spilled the beans to the press and confirmed that Angelina Jolie was expecting twins.