Paul Jones

So, at the beginning I really loved it. The animation is fantastic, the setting is wonderful, and all the cast and crew have great character. It really struck me as "How to Train your Dragon" but in a pirate setting. It started to get preachy a bit with the whole "war, what is it good for?" message, but it was still bearable. But brother, I tell you, those last fifteen minutes are ROUGH. Don't read if you want to avoid spoilers. The over arching theme isn't "war is bad and we must learn to get along." It is, "War is bad, and these people in power lied to us to make it happen so they could get rich and profit." The twist felt so shoe-horned in there, because they don't show us HOW they profit from going out and hunting monsters. The captain cuts off the horn of a beast as it sinks to the bottom, but its just to show they killed it. They don't grind the monsters down or anything. You might say "Well, it is to establish safe trade routes". Well, if the monsters weren't attacking them then this wouldn't have been a problem in the first place. They say the people in power orchestrated this fake history to hunt these sea creatures, but there is no good reason WHY. It just really baffles me, because everything else with this movie was handled fantastically and with such great care only to phone in a phony motive. I knew the last part was going to be preachy when they started talking about history and who says who the bad guys are. And then the girl looks at the stamp on her history book and then at the flag of her country and then goes, "It was THEM." It was just so obnoxiously forced. I felt the forced morale was bad, but they could have made it work with a bit more attention.

So, I only knew there was three movies and a few specials, but I had NO idea that there were actually three series dedicated to Kung Fu Panda. I gave this one a shot and it was painful. I love Jack Black. As I started watching, I was thinking: "Man, this guy is really giving his all to sound like Jack Black. I respect it, but the performance just isn't to par with Jack Black." But it turns out it WAS Jack Black. His performance was just that flat in comparison to his previous work I wasn't even sure it was him. A lot of the stuff that happened in the first episode was essentially undoing all his accomplishments from the previous movies so he "starts from scratch" which is just the laziest way to undo everything. I also notice there was no mention of the five? I skipped ahead a few episodes to see, but there was no sight of them. I just remember when the second movie came out and my friend was excitedly telling me they had plans to make Kung Fu Panda a quintology. I am glad they didn't. I can at least ignore a television series' existence. I gave it two stars because there is some humor in there that works and some of the animation I saw was decent. It's just not a show I would ever watch past the first episode. Edit: I might give the first series a shot. It seems like a few people had some really good things to say about it.