I’ve noted previously that while I thought Kung Fu Panda 1 and 3 were both excellent movies, number 2 in the series was a missed opportunity. Recently, we rewatched all three movies; so today, I feel like analyzing KFP 2 in more detail. It does a lot of things right, so it’s worth trying to understand where it went wrong.

If I had to summarize, it would be this: the script feels like it wasn’t quite a finished draft. There are at least three major deficiencies:

• KFP2 relies quite a bit on filler scenes, which was not true about KFPs 1 and 3.
• Some plot elements are stupid; in particular, Po the panda is made to carry the Idiot Ball at least twice.
• A number of character elements don’t feel like they are used to their fullest.

Let’s dive in. [Spoilers ahead for the first two movies!]

Filler Scenes

A filler scene, as I’m using the term, is a scene that doesn’t develop the plot or the characters. I should stop and say first that not all filler scenes are bad; an awesome spectacle or funny joke can be its own justification. But leaning on filler scenes to pad the movie length can be a warning sign that your movie doesn’t have enough plot action going on.

If you look at KFP 1, each fight scene has a plot or characterization function:

• Our intro to Master Shifu demonstrates the skills of the Furious Five and of Shifu, and shows his severe relationship to them.
• Tai Lung’s escape starts the plot jeopardy, and shows his dangerous skills and something of his personality.
• The bridge fight shows that despite the skills, smooth teamwork, and mutual trust of the Furious Five, Tai Lung still outclasses them all. He also learns Po’s name, and we learn that he wants to best the Dragon Warrior to prove his worth.
• The duel between Tai Lung and Shifu explores the relationship between them, and shows that Shifu is no match for his spurned student.
• Finally, the climax with Po and Tai Lung shows that despite his inexperience, Po is still able to defeat Tai Lung because he has something his opponent lacks.

A similar analysis can be done for KFP 3.

In KFP 2, only some of the fight scenes have a clear function:

• Lord Shen’s arrival showed that he was a dangerous fighter, but not truly first-rank; and it also introduced his personality and some of his motivation.
• The fight scene in the musicians’ village showed that Po had matured as a martial artist and settled into a leadership role with the Five, and they worked together closely and trusted each other.
• The first attempt by Po to confront Lord Shen brings us up against the true story problems.
• The second attempt, however infelicitously staged, sets Po up for his revelation.
• The climactic battle on the ships shows Po’s growth and contrasts it with Lord Shen’s refusal to heal.

By contrast, the entire sequence with the team infiltrating Gongmen City and reaching the prison, and then fighting the wolfpack in a chase scene across the city and to the Palace, could have been significantly shortened or cut entirely. And the two scenes eat up a long stretch of screen time: in a movie that was only 90 minutes long, including nearly 10 minutes of credits, the infiltration scene and chase scene together consume about 9 or 10 minutes.

And that’s not even being picky about the length of the other fight scenes, some of which dragged on a bit.

Stupid Plot Elements

People being stupid is not inherently a problem. The problem is when their stupidity comes from the writer without sufficient justification, rather than from their character or circumstances.

On the plot side, we’ll ignore some of the minor offenses and focus on two big ones: Lord Shen’s search for metal, and Po carrying the Idiot Ball.

Lord Shen wants to gather together lots and lots of metal to make cannon. This leads the wolfpack to attack the musicians’ village to steal everything metal that wasn’t nailed down, and a few things that were. As a result, Po first meets the wolf leader and sees Lord Shen’s mark.

The problem here is that you can’t make cannon by scrounging random bits of metal. It needs to be high-quality metal that can easily be cast and can withstand the high pressures of gunpowder explosions. (Early cannon of the type Lord Shen uses were typically cast out of high-quality bronze.)

Yes, I’m being a nerd; KFP 2 is a kids movie and not a tract on metallurgy, and the visuals of lots of junk being dropped into vats of molten metal are effective. But while the attack on the Musicians’ Village was a funny scene, it also introduces a big plothole: Why attack somewhere so far away from Gongmen City (depicted as far enough to require several days of hard travel for Po and the Five to reach) in order to carry back a bulky, heavy cargo? Was there really no metal at all anywhere closer? How much metal did Lord Shen really need, and why not simply capture a copper mine somewhere?

If the objective was to introduce the wolf leader to Po, the scriptwriters could have come up with a better pretext that made sense within the setting.

And speaking of Po… Po is without question a comedic figure. He often gets himself into trouble, and his attempts to talk his way out are often ridiculous and add to the humor. But while Po is often ridiculous, in KFP 1 and 3 he is never stupid. Everything he does makes sense in the situation, or because of his personality and history.

In KFP 2, however, Po is handed the Idiot Ball at least twice. The first case is a minor sin; during their audience with Lord Shen, Po mistakes some sort of small device for the weapon and attacks it. This had no plot significance and was played for cheap laughs (and frankly, could have easily been cut).

The second seriously undermines Po’s character. During the first confrontation with Shen, Po freezes and allows Shen to escape when he realizes that Shen was somehow a part of Po’s backstory. When the team regroups, however, Po refuses to explain what happened to Tigress and the others, reduced to mumbling that it was all part of the plan, somehow. Worse, when Tigress benches him, he returns to the Palace anyway without telling the others, interferes with the rest of the team (who just so happened to have everything well in hand), and needs to be rescued at great cost.

Po’s behavior is extremely out of character. The movie has already shown that he trusts the Five and they trust him. In his pre-Dragon Warrior days, he idolized the Five. And we have seen him repeatedly tell the truth even when it was embarrassing, even for relatively small matters like a fun anecdote during dinner.

This all could have been avoided if Po had simply been honest with Tigress. And it would have been in character for him to do that; he had already told her about being adopted during the journey to Gongmen City. On a scriptwriting level, it was not even necessary for Po to lie if the writer was committed to the existing plot structure. Po could have been honest with Tigress without it changing the plot; she could decide to bench him anyway, since he’s clearly not able to deal with Shen yet.

Dropped Threads

The script makes several gestures toward character development that don’t really pay off as well as they could have. I’m thinking about two in particular: the contrast between “hardcore” Tigress and soft-style Po, and the underexplored character of Lord Shen.

After Tigress describes her training regimen, Po is awestruck and calls it “hardcore.” Tigress notes that it would be a poor fit for Po: “Hard style is not your thing.” Later, in the prison, as Po refuses to explain what happened between him and Lord Shen, he bitterly says, “The hardcore wouldn’t understand.” Tigress responds by hugging him and saying, “The hardcore do understand.” At last, at the end of the final battle, Tigress complements Po by saying, “Now that was hardcore.”

To me, this felt like a false note. Po had won not by being hardcore, but by exploring the subtle principles of soft-style martial arts—his flowing motions are modeled off of Tai Chi. Additionally, Tigress’s character had no further development in KFP 2. In the first movie, we at least learn a little of her stunted relationship with Shifu when she was young, and her resulting ambition to prove herself against Tai Lung; and in the third movie, it is implied that her friendship with the panda toddler helps nourish a neglected side of her personality. But in this movie, her character development is all but ignored. The script could have easily shortened some of the fight scenes to give her more time.

And now, Lord Shen—absolutely a brilliant character, voiced to perfection by Gary Oldman. He’s the most complex of the trilogy’s villains—hungry for his birthright, but also rejecting it; seeking a vast destiny, but fragile and insecure in the face of a single pudgy panda; obsessing over his parents’ rejection of him, but refusing every overture made by the Soothsayer and later by Po himself. But every so often, there is a moment that seems to cry out for further development. Why does he project his own feelings of rejection onto Po during their second fight? Why did he refuse Po’s final offer of redemption? Why does he believe that “[h]appiness must be taken”?

It might seem a bit churlish to demand that Shen’s character be made even more brilliant than it was. But I still think there were missed opportunities there to tighten down some of the loose bits. Again, if the movie did not lean so hard on filler scenes, there would have been ample space to explore Shen more deeply.

Conclusion

What can we take from this? First, spending a little extra time on the script can mean the difference between a fine movie and a great one. It is true that “Great artists ship,” and a studio has deadlines to work under, but that’s no reason to be satisfied with a product that is not yet as good as it could easily become.

(I continue to be perplexed why so many movie productions that cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars often settle for obviously flawed scripts. Given the money on the line, why yoke your movie to a bad script? Yes, writing is hard, but there are lots of skilled writers out there; so why are so many finished movies garbage? KFP 2 doesn’t sink to that level, but the basic question remains.)

Second, if you have to resort to the Idiot Ball, it means that you are trying to cover up a flaw in your script. Take it as a warning light that there is more work to do, and then do that work rather than damaging your characters.

Third, filler that sucks up time from more important characters or themes is a bad thing. The need to resort to filler, even while some of the character interactions could have been fleshed out, should likewise have warned the scriptwriters that there was more work to do.

And on that note, back to my own writing. Sigh…