Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Kung Fu Panda 2
2011 · Jennifer Yuh Nelson · Kung Fu Panda 2 on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for shallow focus and silhouettes during the fights. (camera)
The virtual camera behaves like a real one. Backgrounds fall out of focus, moves swing like a crane, figures drop into pure outline against firelight. DreamWorks was consulting live-action cinematographers on its films of this period and it shows.
Payoff: The grammar is borrowed from widescreen action cinema rather than from cartoons, which is why the set pieces read as staged rather than drawn.
Look at the reds and firelight against the gray city stone. (light)
The palette is more operatic than the first film's. Saturated warmth and flame on one side, slate stone and cold metallic white on the other, with the light motivated by torches, furnaces and sky.
Payoff: Color sorts the film's two worlds before the plot does, so you always know whose territory a scene belongs to.
Notice how often Po is tiny beside something enormous. (staging)
Zibach builds Gongmen City as vertical stone, and Nelson keeps putting a round soft body next to cannons, towers and vast skies. The staging is organized around silhouette and size rather than detail.
Payoff: The scale gap is the story. A hand-to-hand art is being measured against a machine that does not need a body.
Listen for the cannon against the softer sounds of the village. (sound)
The design keeps two sound worlds apart. Gunpowder hiss, metal, concussive reports on one side. Wood, cloth, voices and noodle-shop clatter on the other. Zimmer and Powell run Chinese instruments through a full orchestra above both.
Payoff: You can hear the film's argument about mechanized violence without anyone making it in dialogue.
Watch for the flat hand-drawn passages that break into the film. (structure)
The memories arrive as stylized two-dimensional animation closer to shadow puppetry, dropped inside a fully volumetric computer-animated feature. They are quiet and slow where the present-day scenes are busy and loud.
Payoff: The film gives its past a different visual language, so you can see the difference between what Po lives and what he half remembers.
Once you have seen it
Time how long a single move is held during a fight. (cutting)
The action is cut for legibility, with clean spatial geography and beats allowed to finish, which was not how live-action action was being cut in 2011. The same edit then drops into near-silent grief and back into slapstick.
Payoff: Holding the choreography lets the animation carry the scene, and the tonal swings land because the cutting never hurries either register.
Listen to how brittle Oldman keeps Shen's voice. (performance)
Shen is played as a wounded aristocrat rather than a villain enjoying himself, thin and vengeful and easily cracked. Black answers with a Po who keeps sliding out of comic bluster into something plainly hurt.
Payoff: The two performances make hero and villain the same injury handled two ways, which is what the plot has been arranging all along.
Look at the shapes in Shen's tower and on his body. (setting)
Knife edges, metal, cold whites, and the peacock plumage used again and again as a compositional device that is beautiful and threatening at once. The panda world is built from the opposite vocabulary, round and warm and soft.
Payoff: Design does the characterization here. You could read the opposition from a still frame with the sound off.
Track the phrase about inner peace each time it returns. (structure)
It is a technique Po has to master in order to fight, and it is the psychological work the story is demanding of him. The film keeps the two meanings running on the same line until they arrive together.
Payoff: A family blockbuster makes acceptance of an unchangeable past into the literal mechanism of its climax, which is a stranger structure than it looks.
Carry this in: Watch the flat, hand-drawn passages. That is where the film keeps what Po cannot say yet.