Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011)

If the best sequels build off their predecessors in ways that progress and deepen the shared material, then good sequels must at least avoid simply rehashing the original. In many respects, Kung Fu Panda 2 feels like the first installment of a franchise that, to be frank, never needed to be a franchise. But apart from a too-comfortable relationship with fat jokes in times of crises, the film never comes off as a retread. My favorite aspect of the first film was its respect for Chinese culture, incorporating its art and architecture—the latter, in my opinion, being the most beautiful in the world—with reverence as it played around in the digital sandbox. That sense of appreciation of the culture, even if it is a background for Jack Black's decidedly non-classical style, extends to the sequel, and I found it funny how the faithfully rendered Chinese palaces and pavilions almost seemed a flight of fancy on the part of the animators because of their beauty and grace.

If the first film occurred in tucked away villages and training halls, Kung Fu Panda 2 moves deeper into the urban sprawl of feudal China, massive collections of homes under the watchful eye of a pagoda so large that, were it any taller, God would strike everyone in it with different tongues to stop all communication. But the religious elegance of the pagoda, like the rest of Gongmen City, also carries a grim sense of oppression, one heightened when a wrathful prince returns to reclaim the throne his horrified parents denied him so long ago.

This villain, Lord Shen (Gary Oldman, proving he can be just as great a bad guy with just his voice as he can in the flesh), immediately sets the film apart from the first by presenting not simply a stronger beast than the tiger who fought against our heroes the last time but a less strong but more graceful creature. An albino Indian peafowl, Shen swoops and twirls, feathers hiding knives that fly out with every flourish, and his mad fury makes these metal showers all the more overwhelming. Yet Shen is also resentful of his lack of force, and he devises cannons from gunpowder as a means of overcoming any fighter superior to him.

Thanks to a prophecy foretelling his fall at the hands of a warrior of black and white, Shen ordered the genocide of pandas years ago, the act that led to his banishment. This, of course, links him to Po, now living the high life as the Dragon Warrior in the Valley of Peace. When Shen's wolves ransack the valley for spare money for the lord's war machines, Po gets his first hint of something deeper with a vague emotional trigger that prompts a memory he does not understand. Later, when Shen kills a great kung fu master with his weaponry and takes back Gongmen, Po and the Furious Five head out to stop him, Po nursing ulterior motives of learning more about the buried identity being unlocked in fragments.

At times, Po's story is a bit too broad and convenient: rewriting the unremarkable Po of the first film to be seemingly the last panda left alive on Earth opens up too many questions. Why did no one ever say anything about his rarity? Did word of a great panda warrior not reach beyond the valley and find its way back to the paranoid Shen? As for Po's relationship with his adoptive father, Mr. Ping (James Hong), the panda slips in and out of total idiocy as he seems both to know that a goose obvious isn't his biological dad and be shocked when Ping finally says it out loud. Po's attempts to find himself through his scattered, subconscious memories would have worked better had the audience not already been told upfront about Shen's extermination of pandas.

Nevertheless, Kung Fu Panda 2 has such sure grasp of emotion that even the holes and redundancies opened up by its script do not truly detract from the film. Po's struggles with identity lead to introspective moments from himself and Mr. Ping, who steals the film with Hong's quivering, almost pleading voice seeking to keep his son's love (he brought nearly everyone in theater, regardless of age, to tears). Furthermore, the repeated flashbacks can be distinguished from each other by looking at the first segment as a matter-of-fact, if folkloric, description of events while the later attempts by Po to piece together his broken recollections show his emotional response to that atrocity and his quest to come to terms with it.

However childish this makes me, I will always be in awe of great animation. Given that I cannot even draw basic outlines with any definition or even linearity (ask anyone I've given one of my strange, pointless comics as a jokey present), I can hardly wrap my head around the sheer number of man-hours and creative collaboration it takes to put together an animated film, either by hand or on computers. That's why I got so frustrated with so many of Dreamworks' projects: why waste all that time and considerable effort on the Shrek films, the movie equivalent of the "Now That's What I Call Music" series? Long passages of Kung Fu Panda are so well-rendered, so enthralling in background and movement and action that I walked out of the theater with barely four pages of notes on a small notepad I cannot see and thus leave massive amounts of white space on each page.

From the bombast of Gongmen City to the mercurial flow of Shen (all swift, slinking movements with bursts of peacockish pride and infinite madness), the animation reflects the style and tone not only of contemporary action cinema but classical Asian art. The animators also use a number of traditional, 2D scenes for flashbacks, and these feel like old Chinese paintings come to life. They could have made the whole film like this, so striking were the 2D interludes. My one complaint is that it was animated like a modern action movie, meaning that active editing occasionally dips into excessive editing, not capturing the full grace and dance of martial arts to instead go for quick flashes of swords and fists. Yet I had a clearer grasp on the space-time relations of characters in even the most complicated scene than I do with most live-action films these days, and director Jennifer Yuh Nelson knows when to pull back and give us a clearer view of the action.

A bit too open at times about trying to magnify the heart and the visual inventiveness of the first (not to mention so predictable that the prophesied victory could have been foretold by the audience as much as any soothsayer), Kung Fu Panda nevertheless manages to do so without becoming to unwieldy and disjunctive. It may not quite reach the simple, pure pleasures of its predecessor, but this film will likely emerge near or at the top of the heap of this year's Summer of Sequels. My love of animation necessarily means I must confront my hatred of children, and one of my unspoken criteria of a great animated film is that it does something to stop kids from making noise.

I might have to amend my cynicism: Kung Fu Panda 2 not only didn't silence children, it made them make different kinds of sounds. They just so happened to be split between riotous laughs, exclamations of wonder and joy, and sniffled, occasionally bawled, tears. That's a greater range of emotional response than this year's slate of hollow, derivative blockbusters is likely to offer. If Dreamworks keeps this sort of thing up, I'm going to have to find a new punching bag. They've finally started acting like a group of professionals with creative drive and vision, and the results over the last few years have been beautiful—let's just look the other way with the upcoming Puss in Boots, shall we?

Steven Spielberg: Hook

The story of Hook's inspiration is, like the film itself, at once so brilliantly and frustratingly childlike that everything that works and fails can be gleaned from its conception. Nick Castle, originally slated to direct a Peter Pan movie after Spielberg gave up the idea, got the idea from his son. The boy did something that only a child ever has the gall to do: when presented with an absolute -- Peter Pan never grows up -- he questioned why. That twist made it perfect for Spielberg to take over the project; only a Disney-fed eternal child like him would think to continue pursuing that idea, and only Spielberg could use it as the last major expulsion of his pet themes before he entered the more serious phase of his career.

Originally slated to make a version of the original Peter Pan in the '80s, Spielberg shelved the project when he had his first child. Wisely, he also believed his thoughts on childhood and the perversion of either staying young in a harshly adult world or maturing too quickly were thoroughly expounded with Empire of the Sun. For Hook, he approaches the same topic from the opposite angle: now that he's a father, a father who might be gone months of the year on location shooting, Spielberg clearly fears he might become the same absentee father that he endured as a child. Thus, for all the light, occasionally distracting comedy of the tale, Hook has as much to say about the director's hangups as any of his other films.

Ingeniously, he recasts Peter Pan as Peter Banning, a Baby Boomer lawyer who, as Wendy (yes, that Wendy) rightly notes, has become a modern pirate. Opening with a Truffaut homage in the form of children's upturned faces as they watch their peers perform a school play of Peter Pan, Hook's gentle mood is broken ever so slightly the second it settles upon Peter (Robin Williams) as he watches his daughter on the stage playing Wendy. Then, it shatters when he cell phone rings. Ignoring his daughter, he then makes plans that conflict with his son Jack's baseball game in the morning.

Though the film tracks Peter, Spielberg roots it in a child's perspective, preparing for the eventual shift back to Neverland but also allowing everyone but Peter to see the effects of his behavior. It is a shame that Spielberg never gives us the point of view of Peter's adult self, the desire to work hard and provide comfortable lives for his family, but then that point of view has always reeked of self-justification anyway and the misery of his family hardly speaks to their well-being.

Only when the family heads to London with a still-fuming Jack does Peter's humanity show. There to help Granny Wendy (Maggie Smith, who in her younger days played Peter on the stage) with a hospital wing dedication in her honor, Peter is still distracted. At the actual dinner, however, he shines, beautifully paying tribute to the woman who took in him and other orphans without saying much at all. Contrasted with his previous coldness, and an ill-timed shift in the deal he thought was a lock causes him to explode at his children, we can see the good man in Peter, even if he cannot.

The lighting in this first segment is soft, tranquil but also ghostly. This is most visible at the charity ball where dozens of table lamps first illuminate the power and meaning of Wendy's efforts with orphans then turn cold and ominous as Hook's return sends waves of chilled atmosphere rolling across an already frigid London. Once Peter is lured back to Neverland -- by, who else, that zipping ball of light known as Tinker Bell (Julia Roberts) -- Spielberg alters the lighting scheme to something brighter, more optimistic, replacing artificial light with the natural sunlight the office-bound Peter likely had not noticed in years.

Spielberg has his fun with the character, making Peter Pan not only a grown man but one with an intense fear of heights and flying. After stumbling into Hook's pirate hangout and confronting the mad captain, Peter must suffer the humiliation of having to chase his trapped children up a mast under the ultimatum that, if he can simply fly like Pan and touch Jack and Maggie's hands, they can go free. All the poor man can do is tremble and fail when he attempts to climb out and grab them. Only Tinker Bell's quick-thinking saves the Bannings from death, and her successful plying of Hook's vanity gives Peter a shot at rediscovering his past self to add some punch to the fight.

Without question, Hook is a flawed film. Nowhere are the issues more apparent than in the Lost Boys' hideaway, a bizarre yet unimaginative mash-up of classical tree house structure with modern touches like a skate park(!). The use of oddly placed bright paint -- contained in suction-cup arrows, placed in a large pool used for rough landings in flying lessons -- captures less a sense of the childhood id gone mad than Spielberg grasping at straws for something that might amuse a kid. For a director all too often accused of being emotionally stunted, Spielberg suffers from the opposite problem here: like Peter, he's grown up, and returning to his innocence proves an unexpected challenge.

The most egregious indicator of the director's age showing is the dinner scene, where Peter looks on helplessly as the Lost Boys eat what appears to be nothing until he too plays along and finds a feast laid before him. As the dinner begins and the children exclaim over the foods they're eating, one boy exultantly shouts "banana squash!" What goddamn child in the history of human existence has ever lost his mind for banana squash? Adults don't even get excited for it. You're telling me that a child (a runaway child with no parental conditioning, no less), left to imagine his ultimate meal, would A) have anything that could even pass as a vegetable and B) wouldn't invent some magical meat made of ice cream? It's a small detail, I grant you, but it's indicative of the issues that mar the film.

Likewise, the Lost Boys themselves lack characterization beyond their appearance, from the jovial, roly-poly Thud Butt to a wee lad whose shortness reveals an impish cad. I've been watching this film since before I could even remember, and I've yet to decide whether Rufio works as a character or derails the entire picture. That a Lost Boy would assume authority of the troupe in Pan's absence is sensible, but there are several problems with Rufio. For one thing, even though Pan was always the biggest of the Lost Boys, he hovered around 12 and 13. Rudio looks like he drove into Neverland after stealing his stepdad's GTO and avoiding the prom because his high school suspended him. For another, he does not ever fit in with the other boys, and his attempts to engage in the goofy imagination that occupies the Lost Boys' time resemble a teen awkwardly breaking out old toys and messing with them like an Alzheimer's patient who has forgotten their function.

By the same token, he obviously looks like the clear leader in Peter's absence, and his half-punk styling fits within the genteel vision of Lord of the Flies that is the adolescent anarchy of the Lost Boys. He regards Peter with scorn because he's a grown-up, but the more Peter proves himself and reveals his inner Pan, the more Rufio prepares to hand power back without a fight. Dante Basco clearly had fun working on this large-scale production, an undeniable step up from his start as a child breakdancer and bit actor, and the twinkle in his eye as he gets to sneer at Robin Williams carries the character much further than anything he actually says.

What the film does well is explore Peter's half-regression, half-evolution to a man who remembers his responsibilities but also taps into his childish side. Williams finds one of his best mixes of his manic, often grating comic style and powerful but occasionally maudlin dramatic side, and he arguably wouldn't better the balance he found here until World's Greatest Dad last year. He plays Peter as the sort of man who would yell, "When are you going to stop acting like a child?" at his 10-year-old son, who has the only possible answer: "I am a child!" In Neverland, Williams has the unlikely role of straight man, the one who has to remain calm and incredulous instead of unleashing his series of impersonations and stream-of-consciousness rants. Fresh off two lauded dramatic performances in Dead Poets Society and Awakenings that showed off his Julliard-honed skills, Williams perhaps uses Peter's arc to get back in touch with his own roots.

Still, even when the old, playful Pan reemerges, the best comedy of the film by a mile belongs to the double act of Hook and Smee. Hoffman and Bob Hoskins could not be more game for their roles, and they play their relationship less as master and servant than mental patient and caretaker, Smee constantly trying to buck up Hook in his incessant and hysterical bouts with suicidal depression. Hoffman takes the same tics and obsessive mannerisms that made Rain Man so borderline offensive and turns them into comedy gold: his Hook is all slight nods and twitching lips, trying vainly to act respectable until he explodes in villainous glee. There's a reason the film is called Hook, because whenever he's on-screen, the film swells.

Symbols of emotional and physical baggage run through Spielberg's films, from suitcase a starved, half-mad Jamie drags out of the internment camp in Empire of the Sun to the image of the Devil's Tower Roy cannot get out of his mind until he leaves it, and Earth (and his family), behind him in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Several predominant symbols in Hook lock and unlock memories, their potency enhanced by Neverland's ability to make one forget himself. Before leaving for the charity function, Peter attempts to make amends with Jack by giving him his watch, a sign of adulthood and responsibility. Hook, naturally, hates clocks of all kinds owing to that damn crocodile that haunts him even after he killed it, uses that watch to break Jack. Playing on the boy's resentment of his father, Hook brainwashes Jack into loving him instead, and the clear break comes when the boy smashes Peter's watch.

Another symbol is a baseball, which Jack carries around with him. Hook organizes a baseball game to fully win Jack over, and when the boy hits the home run he never could in the real world, he finally gets his perfect childhood wish even as he sends the symbol of his innocence rocketing away from him. When it hits Peter on the head, it helps jog back his own priorities, but he must find his own repository of childhood to fully reawaken his own powers. This he finds in a teddy bear, a symbol Spielberg already used way back in his first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express, thus tying Peter's childhood with his own.

These intelligent touches keep me coming back to Hook long after I should have grown out of it, but they remain frustrating when taken with the film's many missteps. There's a terrific moment of slapstick during the pirates' ballgame when a man tries to steal second and is shot, much to Hook's annoyance, but the funniness of the moment also begs the question why Jack just doesn't react at all to a man being murdered in front of him, in some ways because of him and his desire to play a game no one else in Neverland understands. The climactic fight should carry the weight of two old rivals engaging in their final duel, but the slapstick of the Lost Boys' involvement turns a bloodbath into Home Alone; I half-expected Commander Macaulay Culkin to lead a division of Lost Boys. And in one of the film's true serious moments, Peter's recollection of his mother and how he came to Neverland, Spielberg and his writers come up with a backstory that clashes with the director's visual accompaniment. Peter speaks of fleeing his family because he was afraid of mortality, yet the film shows his baby carriage simply sliding away (and his mother just not reacting in any way whatsoever). Even setting that aside on grounds of whimsy and fantasy, we're still left with a baby who was apparently engaged in philosophical rumination on the nature of death, and suddenly we're back in banana squash territory.

Yet I still do enjoy Hook, with its Hook/Smee dynamic (further proof that Spielberg can make comedy work when he adheres to a more classical structure instead of his more epically scaled missteps) and the form that only Spielberg can bring. He breaks from reality as soon as possible here, casting an intense but cold light reminiscent of the the passing UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind outside the children's bedroom in Wendy's house. Shots bookend each other, whether in close proximity -- a long shot of Peter standing on the balcony after the children's abduction to Tinker Bell flying in and assuming a similar scale with the dollhouse inside. Spielberg had no reason to go to Neverland, not after saying everything he could have said there in an internment camp in Shanghai, but he does find new topics for discussion even if they might have been better served elsewhere. At its core, Hook is one of two expulsions of Spielberg's "old" style before he entered into the modern phase of his career. Unlike Empire of the Sun, both Hook and Jurassic Park would couch his themes in his more broadly entertaining élan. But if Hook is all about taking out all the childish things we put away, the director used it to stow his old self as he prepared for one of the most remarkable late-careers of any prominent filmmaker.