Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)

Everyone’s favorite animated fighting bear has returned for Kung Fu Panda 2. This time around, he’s just as rotund, a little more confident, and a lot more reflective. He’s in search of his biological parents and ever-elusive “inner peace,” while trying to stave off the demise of his beloved martial art.

At the start of the film, Po (voiced by Jack Black) is doing all right, having discovered a loyal group of skilled kung fu compadres in the Furious Five (Angelina Jolie as Tigress; Jackie Chan as Monkey; Seth Rogen as Mantis; Lucy Liu as Viper; and David Cross as Crane) to help him fulfill his destiny of being the Dragon Master. But when a band of marauding wolves descend on Po’s hometown, The Valley of Peace, he must abandon his current lesson from Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) to stop the gang from stealing all the metal in town.

The wolf gang is just the tip of iceberg. They’re really being commanded by Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), an albino peacock bent on dominating all of China and rendering kung fu obsolete with his new invention, the cannon. When Po sees Shen’s symbol–a red eye–on the head wolf’s uniform, it triggers a flashback to a dark day from his childhood and a pair of creatures that look remarkably like him. It suddenly occurs to Po–who has never seen another living panda–that maybe Mr. Ping (James Hong), the noodle-cooking goose that raised him, is not his biological dad. Maybe he’s adopted.

There’s no inner peace to be found in that knowledge. In fact, it triggers Po’s recurring nightmares: hand-drawn and artfully executed nightmares that play like a hybrid of Chinese shadow theater and flipbook animation. It’s the kind of work that shows the same reverence to Chinese culture that director Jennifer Yuh contributed in her role as Head of Story for the franchise’s original installment.

The visual magic breaks down somewhat while the gang is awake. The film’s slick, computer-generated images lack the depth, color and detail that make CG technology worthwhile and that, incidentally, Pixar (Kung Fu Panda 2 is a Dreamworks Animated film) more often seems to get right. In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t see the movie in 3D. But, it stands to reason, that if you can’t master the first two dimensions, the third is pretty much guaranteed to be out of your reach. But the film’s final face-off between Po and Lord Shen’s armada of dragon-sailed ships, punctuated by fireworks, is detailed and gorgeous.

Thankfully, there are performances that add depth to Kung Fu Panda 2 where the picture lacks it. Hong continues to be hilarious as Po’s worrywart, penny-pinching dad. The richness of Oldman’s voice manages to make an animal as small, graceful and beautiful as the peacock (here, given feathers that it throws like razor-sharp knives) as menacing as a full-grown lion. Sure, all Oldman does these days is play insane bad guys, but he’s so darn good at it. Another standout is Michelle Yeoh, who joins the cast as a soothsaying, scene-stealing goat. Her soothing, grounded voice makes every scene she’s in that much better.

I should note for parents of tiny tots that the story, as penned by returning scribes Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, is much darker than the original. I’m talking Disney dark. Po is ostensibly the last panda because a teenage Lord Shen went on a genocidal rampage when the soothsayer predicts that a panda will thwart the peacock’s mission for world domination. Shen was subsequently banished from his home by his parents, took up with bullying wolves and gorillas for protection and companionship, and exacts brutal revenge on the kung fu council who guards what should have been his kingdom. To quote another terrifying animated villain: Be prepared.

Still, Kung Fu Panda 2 has enough silly, slapstick humor in the form of Jack Black’s boundless energy to distract from the darker subject matter. Besides, (SPOILER ALERT): Po’s not really the last panda. After all, how else would there be a Kung Fu Panda 3?