Kung Fu Panda

By Richard Corliss | June 23, 2011 | +

DreamWorks Animation LLC

Director: Mark Osborne, John Stevenson

Year Released: 2008

Cast: Jack Black, Ian McShane, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen, David Cross, Randall Duk Kim

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Po (voiced by Jack Black) dreams of martial-arts glory: defeating the legendary Furious Five kung fu masters in mortal combat. When he wakes, though, he’s just a doughy panda who works in the village noodle shop run by his father — who happens to be a goose, but never mind that for now. Po unaccountably is declared the region’s savior and put under the tutelage of the sage Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) — not to battle the Furious Five but to team with them to defeat a Voldemorty beast who’ll be breaking out of prison any day now. Taking as their source the same Hong Kong martial-arts films that inspired both Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the oaf-becomes-a-hero plot of Stephen Chow’s 2004 Kung Fu Hustle, directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne devised a master course in cunning visual art and satisfying entertainment: the best and ultimate DreamWorks feature.

If Pixar is the ring bearer of the classic Disney style and uplifting temperament, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s DreamWorks Animation studio is an update of the zany Warner Bros. gestalt: zany, parodic, brimming with pop-culture references. Pixar films might aspire to (and achieve) universal art; DreamWorks reminds the movie industry that “animated feature” is just a fusty phrase for “cartoon.” There’s no question which studio is more influential. DreamWorks’ vaudeville vibe, first paraded in the Shrek series, directly infiltrated animated films from Ice Age to Despicable Me and plenty more. Panda seasons the Katzenberg recipe with a splendid kinetic elegance in the fight scenes — kung-furious panda-monium — and trumps it with the contemplative message that strength and discipline can’t be taught but instead must be discovered within. A wise heart matches the movie’s art.

Next: Paprika

Related Topics: Dreamworks, Jack Black, Kung Fu Panda

Paprika

By Richard Corliss | June 23, 2011 | +

Director: Satoshi Kon

Year Released: 2006

Cast: Megumi Hayashibara, Tōru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori, Tōru Furuya, Akio Ōtsuka

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Anime, the Japanese form of cartooning, has yielded far more animated features in its 40-some-year existence than the rest of the world put together. From this teeming, often dark and astonishingly sophisticated output, Satoshi Kon’s last completed film is one of the most forbidding and beguiling. It’s an R-rated psychological detective story about a machine, the DC Mini, that offers the key to unlock the meaning of dreams — even as animation is, in a way, the key to unlock the feeling of dreams. A police detective hopes to solve a murder by telling his dreams to the sexy Paprika, who is also a staid researcher named Atsuko. They are aided or threatened by the usual sci-fi-noir suspects, but the plot is so complicated, it’s best not to worry about parsing it and just go with the seductively somnambulist flow, which is where the movie finds its true life. Paprika alternates dream with reality, or abruptly fuses the two, until the detective, and the viewer, can’t tell them apart.

Kon, whose earlier films included the sado-thriller Perfect Blue and the movie-crazy Millennium Actress and who died in 2010 at 46 of pancreatic cancer, saw modern media as not linear but oneiric. “Don’t you think that dreams and the Internet are similar?” asks Paprika. “They’re both places where the repressed conscious mind vents.” But the place where the detective will unlock his mystery is a movie palace, the dark cathedral where the communicants’ separate obsessions become one dream on a giant screen. And the most fluid form of movies is animation. Paprika is both an argument for and a demonstration of animation’s power to put us into a state of alert hypnosis. Watch the images that float by, the impulses that pass from the characters to you. You are getting … very … dreamy.