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)
These passages are 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 these passages their own visual language, so you can see them as a different kind of image.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the flat, hand-drawn passages. They look nothing like the rest of the film.