DISCLAIMER: I would probably say the same thing while I'm sober.
I don't know that for sure though. Elements of my expression my be altered due to my disinhibited state.
Also I didn't bother formatting past the first title. Please forgive my oversight but right now I'm too...drunk to proofread. Go figure.
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A few days ago my mother mentioned that Kung Fu Panda was out on DVD at the local stores. I said sure, let's get it, so she did, in order to give my brother some entertainment when he visits from LA.
Then I ended up watching it 3 times in a row, second time with subtitles and third time with directors' commentary.
I've also watched it in the cinema and was doing active comparison.
Don't get me wrong. As a film, Kung Fu Panda is fun, it's gorgeous, and it has groundbreaking animation but that doesn't make the film. In fact as a film it's one of those "the whole is less than the sum of the parts", because frankly if you're going to look at it as the product, it didn't quite deliver what went into it.
I will wear the fact that I am a hopeless KFP fanboy in the face of that very valid criticism. Which of course may have you demanding I justify myself: is this for any other reason than I may still be a "closet furry"? I have some unnatural liking for pandas? (Actually I can think of a good friend who would fit this bill much better than I do...I just happen to think a panda is perfect for Jack Black but nothing else).
Actually I am perfectly aware of the various reasons, so I shall enumerate them.
1) I'm an artist.
2) I'm particularly interested in restoring some of the elements of animation that people are nostalgically pining for.
3) I know my Hong Kong kung-fu cinema.
4) I'm Asian.
In more detail:
1) This is actually multifaceted. First off I can appreciate that there are many products that people take for granted. I therefore no longer appreciate pieces of art on the basis of success of the finished product so much as the idea and if I can observe the 'labour of love' that went into it. KFP is one of these works where it is extremely obvious to me that the project was in fact the very pared down, painfully disciplined (and therefore generic looking) version of a labour of love for which there is a huge amount of potential that will have ramifications for the industry that the mindless consume will have NO CLUE WHATSOEVER about.
But because I happen to know what goes into the process of spending 20 hours on a single concept picture that your average person will look at for a millisecond and then toss aside, I love KFP all the more for it. I know that the directors want people to get lost in the story and this is possible for reasons I'll detail later but frankly the mainstream audience which they pitched it towards will simply NOT GET IT. I'm breaking their rules here but I firmly believe they need that small percentage of people who will actually appreciate what went into it because I happen to know that deep down what touches an artist the most, despite their vision statements, is if somebody actually gets what they're doing. I don't know very much about 3D animation but I sure realised that they must have done serious work with the rigs and the bones in order to animate cartoon effects seen in cel-shaded cartoons in freakin' 3D models. Because the Furious Five were unfortunately not showcased as fully as possible, I don't think anybody really appreciated that snake was an incredibly difficult and therefore unique issue in 3D animation, nor were the rope bridges. These things are actually UNIQUE to 3D animation and when I saw the depth of the scenery, I could not help but notice that this was in fact like nothing I've, or for that matter anybody has ever seen before.
And still most people don't get it, and I don't blame them.
Furthermore as an artist I understand that animated fur is, under any circumstance, a real pain to get right. Animated fur UNDER REALISTIC CLOTHES in scenes WITH FULL CROWDS and FULL LIGHTING in MULTILAYERED EFFECTS such as confetti and fireworks and explosions...this is really the ultimate in this 'labour of love'- 18 months to light a 2 minute scene that gets cut into 3 second panning shots.
Seriously.
I don't expect people to agree with me, except those fellow artists who understand what it's like to put in 2000% for something to get 5% return by people who look and don't bother thinking. And I happen to know (from the commentary) that is what the directors and the production team and everybody else involved in the making of KFP also think. They're simply proud of what they did.
2) One other criticism that was directed against KFP is that the bulk of it is in 3D and therefore people will think "oh, another 3D movie". This is in part a valid tide of sentiments of the public, as KFP is one of the latest in a series of increasingly generic 3D releases. The first fully 3D character was released in a Final Fantasy film I never saw back in '99, but since then I think it would have reached maximum appeal around the time of the first Shrek, and after that the novelty has worn off.
Again the directors' commentary merely validated a suspicion of mine: The film opened with a 2D sequence that was Po's dream, imbued with dream-like qualities and a somewhat nostalgic, whimsical style. This was a clear indication to me that this sentiment was not lost on the team, but nonetheless they had their own idea of what they wanted to do.
I'm personally glad they did the rest of the film in 3D, though my heart did a little leap when I saw the various 2D things. My own personal vision, and that shared by a little (but increasingly vocal) group of the community is to restore a certain quality of animation to its former glory, to bring 2D FBF animation back to the center as an edgy, painstaking and magical form of expression. Some people want the old Disney. Other people what to explore the artsy directions that modern graphic novel has paved the way for...I'm one of the latter as I'm definitely not strong in the ways of Disney animation. And as I said I have no personal no-know in the way of 3D animation and I'm not even going to bother as it will take far more time than I could ever spend, and also far more processing and man power. To get good production in 3D, you need a team of unmitigated awesome. I'm just one man of mildly good.
Relating this back to (1), though, I've published a couple of .gifs here as "test animations". I've pointed out how those were 70 frames for <4 seconds of 20fps and that's just bordering on the line of "barely good enough to look convincing". 70 frames of mouse drawing. Probably in the ballpark of 15 hours of work and 3 hours of post-editing.
Even a tablet can't cut all that into bite-sized pieces.
3) Here's where I really start diverging from the discerning film-goer. If I want something that is really conceptually ground-breaking without selling out, I go watch something like, say, "The Constant Gardener".
That's fine. However when I go see KFP and it's groundbreaking animation that I'm not SUPPOSED to appreciate, but take for granted, am I also supposed to expect some groundbreaking storytelling?
HELL NO.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.
No. I am not. Why am I so insistent on this? Because KFP is at its heart a homage to Hong Kong martial-art cinema, particularly the early heady days of Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
If, and only if you have seen the Drunken Master and Once Upon In China series (almost the barest minimum if you want to say you're into HK kung-fu film...the Hollywood stuff is either underrated or full of shit), will you actually start to understand why some people (i.e. me) cack themselves laughing at various unpredictable moments in the film. And sure, you can say the directors shortchanged themselves in the process of swapping a great storyline for a series of in-jokes and martial-art gags, meaning that their true fan-base is limited to a, uh, very limited scope of people, typified by people who are simultaeneously into martial arts, animation and the artistic vision i.e. me. But since I fall into that fanbase I don't give a flying...axe-kick what people who *don't* fall into that category think.
You're free to think that by all other criteria that this film is either an empty trophy cabinet or a flop. But if you dare say that it is a flop *in making that indulgence* of consisting of HK cinema jokes, I will probably split your nut in two with some crazy kung-fu move.
Once again in the directors' notes, KFP makes obvious references to the training sequence (lifted almost directly out of the Drunken Master series...moreso the first to be honest, what with the crazy upside-down sit-ups...that I adopted into my training regimen and developed rock-hard rippling abs with...no joke...even if I'm drunk...), the crazy training room (36 chambers of Shaolin), and the stupid ending fight scenes (such as Jet Li as the rooster against what I'm going to call the centipede, and "Evil Laugh" Gordon..."try laughing now!" "kukukuahhaahahahahaha...ahhh...ahhh...AHHHH OWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!"...or Jacky Chan making himself retarded by drinking industrial-grade oil to bring out the drunken fist in DM2). The decision not to try to break this mold was a conscious one and one that therefore affected the outlook of the film dramatically. For me, I simply loved those films because (and this relates to (4) as well), they relate to a certain desire and background in me, and so any chance to relive this in a way that I deem authentic or even convincing in the context of a mainstream production is nothing short of mind-blowing.
4) Yes, I'm Asian. As I mentioned before, I love martial arts, but it doesn't stop there. Since I was born to and raised by Chinese (ethnically) parents, I also learnt various elements of Chinese culture. I remember the fondness and earnestness in which my parents celebrated Chinese cultural events before it was appropriated by commercial multicultural society, awesome as this is in other ways.
And finally, I also appreciate (and this is a difficult pill for my non-Asian friends to swallow), the Asian familial and cultural values.
I used to have a big problem with this, feeling depatriated in a country where racial tensions were continually noted by my mother and I could not understand or discern them in the face of constant cultural tensions in which I was continually being told that my values were off-kilter with Australian values, and that I should tell my parents to go f*** off and let me do my own thing. I would feel alienated because I would have no idea how to express the fact that I simply felt incapable of doing that as this is something utterly alien to my notion of existence simply because of cultural indoctrination. I furthermore did not realise that many of these people had cultivated this kind of behavior as their own manner of either forcing their own asserted independence, or setting in concrete emotional scars that they were frankly not mature or big enough to ever settle with their family, or simply never had the opportunity. I'm bold enough to say this last statement now because I know people from such backgrounds who have actually gone and taken those steps and refer to their earlier years as "the rebellious years" and despite not seeing eye to eye with their parents, still care deeply and get along with them. More importantly I felt that these last few months have been a progressive coming to terms with my own cultural background, which brings me to what I say now.
It is with an unmitigated nostalgia for a world I was never part of, but perhaps vicariously remembered, that I so fondly regard KFP and its painstaking attention to detail of portraying the various Chinese archetypes, costuming, martial art culture and festivals, right down to the vivid dragon dance and blowing confetti through its nostrils (harkening back to (1) in which I hinted at the attention to detail only possible in true 'labour of loves'. In fact, I have no idea how somebody who was genuinely Chinese (as opposed to ABC like myself) would react, but since this is directed by Western people who want to emulate Chinese culture, it therefore engenders a perspective that more specifically Western-raised Chinese like myself would more readily identify with.
My Asian (and Mediterranean) friends and I laugh at the interactions between the various characters (Po and his 'ridiculously anserian' father) because we appreciate how the family values come into play. My mother laughs at the same thing. The voice actors of Po's father and of Master Oogway both come from that cultural background, and so really bring to life their characters and the inflections of their speech, bringing home environments and common refrains so familiar to me.
My own "rebellious years" are starting to pass and fade behind me, replaced by an increasingly dominant, genuine care and concern for my mother and her apparently failing health. Having passed the test of my ability to live independently, I have instead been occupied with the sense that now is a time more than ever to live that which our rocky relationship previously denied us, a familial relationship which involves compromises and sacrifices that I used to resent but now would rather gladly make, for it is the way I've been brought up and now the way that I quite like living. Yeah, I'm a total mummy's boy and I'm aware this panders to my mother's way of life, and I accept that, as well as the constant lectures on how I ought to study more and be more focused and not breakdance because that, in her opinion, doesn't get the chicks (she's probably right). Now I'm glad to simply catch up on these opportunities before time runs out again, as it did for my father. Because when it does, there is never enough time for regret.
This is my way of life and those who don't understand it may feel free to say they don't understand it, make fun of it and criticise it as much as they like. I used to take exception to this but now it doesn't bother me at all (in fact I'll wear my renewed familial piety proudly). All this means is that there are still fundamental cultural differences and I can now appreciate the racial tensions that still exist in this day and age that have always been there, but I simply couldn't discern.
That probably sums it up more than sufficiently. In short, you can like KFP because it has Jack Black (and/or Angelina Jolie and/or Jackie Chan and/or a number of other voice-actors) in it, and you can like it because it's cute and loveable and has vivid characters that you don't really see enough of. You can also hate it for the same reasons, and furthermore find it disappointing because it always seemed cracked up to more than what it ended up being.
But it is my somewhat ridiculously, partially (I'm less drunk now) inebriated opinion that you really can't appreciate KFP unless you fulfill the four criteria as I've listed at the beginning of this rant. And I also appreciate this isn't a very large fan base, but I would dearly like the directors and everybody involved in the project to know that they've really tickled the fancies of at least this nutcase and furthermore this nutcase would very much be looking forward to seeing various stories being fleshed out in the future, if even only as an indulgence of artist's paradise, and maybe a bit of pulling this tragic's heartstrings.
So on that note, since I actually don't know ANYBODY else who would actually agree with me for those reasons, I open the floor to a big round of indifference.
...or hearty disagreement if you're Klaushouse. But then again if you're Klaushouse you'll also be foolish enough to think that you're more Asian than I am. BUT YOU'RE NOT!
