Hi, I'm Mark Osborne. One of the directors on Kung Fu Panda.
I'm John Stevenson, the other director on Kung Fu Panda.
And welcome to the commentary!
It's been a long four years.
We were really inspired by anime in making this film,
so we wanted to start the film not only as an homage to anime,
but we wanted to find a new way to create a 2-D look
for kung fu.
And we're really, really excited with what
Ramone and Jen came up with
for the look of this sequence.
Also, I like the idea of starting a computer-generated movie
with a traditional 2-D sequence.
We love traditional animation
and hope it comes back.
We particularly love it when it's very stylised,
as it is in this dream sequence here.
We also thought it would be the perfect way of showing the biggest contrast
between Po's dream life, where he's free to do all these crazy, heroic things,
and then contrast that when we go into our computer-generated images
with his more gravity-based reality.
We should also talk about James Baxter,
who is the fantastic animator behind this sequence.
We were lucky to have him involved in this.
It was a combination of wanting to be limited,
look like anime, but we wanted fluid animation.
They came up with a great style that was fluid,
at the same time had the pose-to-pose limited quality of anime.
Also, we've got hugely-vibrant, saturated colours,
'cause we're going to make the contrast once we go to
what's reality in our film,
where we're using computer graphics
of a more muted palette when we first see Po.
It's really a Technicolor dream that goes to a more subdued
colour palette when we go into reality.
It's worth pointing out that this is the first CG movie
at Dream Works to be shot in CinemaScope.
So here we are coming up on the great reveal that this has all been a dream.
And we find Po in the reality that
now he has weight.
And we get to meet Jack, the real Po, for the first time.
We meet him in his environment. It's very different, very quiet.
It was something we wanted to show the contrast between
the dream life and the reality as much as possible.
The other thing worth noting,
because it's a visual motif we will be revisiting throughout the film,
our first real look at Po, he's upside down.
Po being upside down is something we'll see a few times.
I'll point them out, they each have a particular significance to us.
Dan Wagner did a lot of this animation we're seeing here.
He's really the master of the Po animation
and established what Po would look like early on.
The subtlety of his acting,
I think Dan did an incredible job
of establishing the sensitivity of the character.
That shadow of Po's father,
we put that in the category of one of our way-home type jokes.
-Nobody laughs at it. -Nobody gets it.
Hey, can't win them all.
It's supposed to be a misdirect
that that shadow is the shadow of a panda.
So, next time, see if that works for you.
It certainly doesn't work for most people the first time.
That's one of our failures, I think,
in trying to make an interesting reveal
that Po's father is a goose.
Why? Why is Po's dad a goose?
A lot of people come out of screenings asking that question.
For us, it was a hilarious thing that one of our story artists came up with.
Alfred Gimeno, he always threw out these big, wacky ideas.
At one point, he had Po's dad as a goose.
It was hilarious. We loved it and ran with it.
Originally, Po was working,
had a mean goose boss
when he was working as a short-order cook.
Alfred said, "He's not his boss. He's his dad."
He was a caring dad, putting his hat on him, putting his apron on him.
We should make a big shout out right now for Mr James Hong,
who does an absolutely wonderful job as Po's dad.
He brought a lot of warmth and heart
and comedy to Po's father, who is a very simple character.
He has only got room in his head for two things.
There are two things in the world he loves, his son and noodles. That's it.
And he can't possibly imagine
why Po would ever want to do anything other than noodles.
People say, "Why doesn't Po tell his dad about his love of kung fu?"
It's because he doesn't want to break his dad's heart.
In the early days of exploring this, trying to figure out who Po was,
at one point he lived with his mom, out in the Bamboo Forest.
He worked at a chime factory.
There used to be loads of other pandas, he used to live in a panda village.
We tried everything until we settled on this idea
that he works in his dad's noodle shop.
And it makes him the outcast, in a sense,
there are no other pandas in the film.
This is our first glimpse of kung fu, with the Furious Five attacking Shifu.
This was actually one of the last kung fu sequences we did on the film.
At this point, animation knew how to make
these characters do all the cool things we see throughout the movie.
We wanted to start our introduction of the world of kung fu
with a huge, explosive bang.
Have the Five attacking this little old man.
It's also the first time that we show
how our camera work is different for our kung fu scenes.
It's our rule, when we're just shooting dialog and character scenes,
the cameras are pretty restrained, pretty formal.
When we go to our fight scenes, the cameras gets more active and dynamic.
It's a really important contrast
to make sure you guys get a rich experience.
Many ups and downs.
This is the first time we're seeing Dustin Hoffman.
We wanted to give you the misdirect that he's the wise, old master.
And then we reveal him to be the least-Zen Zen Master ever.
And we also have the amazing Randall Duk Kim as Master Oogway.
We were very lucky to find him.
He has such warmth.
Every time we played any sequence with Shifu and Oogway,
even Dustin was like, "That guy's amazing."
We went for a very abstract version of Tai Lung,
and processed the animation
so that it felt almost flat and 2-D.
But it's also the introduction of our evil colour.
We have a complex colour theory in the film.
Blue is our negative colour, associated with Tail Lung. He's a show leopard.
That's the first very blue sequence.
And the petals that are on the moon pool,
which will tie into Oogway's peach tree,
and it's also the introduction of the circle motif.
And we elected to have, basically, not a comic villain,
but a scary, driven,
in his mind, an emotionally justified villain.
But we were making the pact that Walt Disney made with his audience,
for all the classic films, which is
there is going to be scary stuff and dangerous stuff in this movie,
but it's going to work out okay.
It was in the first recording session that Jack...
He started to reveal his more insecure and vulnerable side,
something that has been in all of his performances,
to mitigate some of the abrasiveness.
But he really was bringing that to the fore.
That was a huge gift that he brought to the film.
And once we saw that, it really made Po a much more appealing character.
A guy who was very self-aware,
who knew his limitations and...
And would often feel very bad about them.
We went back and tried to retool the whole film
to support that idea which Jack had brought to us.
And we wanted to shackle Po to this noodle cart,
as much as he dreams about kung fu, he just can't get away from this
noodle burden that his father puts on him.
And we see how that plays out
at the bottom of the staircase of 1,000 stairs.
That becomes a big, running gag throughout the movie.
Po and stairs. People laugh.
Ours is probably the most stair-centric movie we could think of.
We're always having Po
run up or fall down the stairs throughout the film.
There's a reason for it, for the end. There's a lot of stairs in our movie.
In this gag, we wanted to be as dramatic as possible
in setting up this whole Po climbing up the stairs.
We wanted to make it in the hot sun, like he's crawling across the desert.
Then we get this great reveal.
It was one of the earlier jokes that we tried 1,000 different versions of
and finally settled on this version.
Let's give a shout out to the Shaw brothers,
Jack's Tenacious D brothers,
Kyle Gass and J.R. Reed.
J.R. Reed. It's amazing. We got all of Tenacious D in our movie.
The Shaw brothers, a tip of the hat, obviously,
to the legendary kung fu film studio
that came up with some of the greatest martial arts movies ever made.
So, here, when we get in...
There's all these great mechanisms the Furious Five are going to battle.
You see them just for a split second.
One of the earliest versions of this sequence,
you saw the Five battling these giant mechanical beasts
and all these really cool things.
Buy the game, you'll get to see what they look like.
It was better, story-wise, to stay with Po and to be trapped outside with Po
in the shadow of this great event that's happening inside.
It gave us a much better stage
for the comedic beats
of Po struggling to get in, to not see that stuff.
There's a couple of lighting choices,
everything inside the auditorium
is lit with bright sunshine.
Po's outside and he's kept in shadows.
So he's away from his dream,
from the thing he wants.
We also, unapologetically, decided this was going to be a very broad
slapstick, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones
kind of sequence with those kind of visual gags,
to establish that we could do that.
This is also one of the most technically complex of our sequences.
There are so many crowd characters.
They're all wearing incredibly complicated clothing.
We also have other effects.
The shots of the crowd
would take...
They would be on the render farm for days.
Even when they're out of focus, in the background,
they're just specks of colour,
they still have to have all their cloth and everything proper.
And it's pretty frustrating.
But it gives...
Once we get all those details right,
it really gives a nice realistic setting.
I think this sequence took 18 months to light.
It was incredibly difficult.
We the audience can't see what's happening inside.
And we know it's really cool
because we've seen the Furious Five in a dream.
So these little glimpses we get here are
supposed to tease the audience as much as Po gets teased.
This sequence came up, our story artists teamed up
and did a jam on this sequence.
We had every story artist in our whole crew
working on coming up with ideas
of how we keep Po outside.
Because we wanted to riff on the idea
that he keeps trying crazier and crazier things to get in.
And it was Phil Craven who brought up the idea of using fireworks,
that Po would finally strap fireworks to a chair.
And that's based on an urban legend,
a myth of a low-level
Chinese official
from the Ming Dynasty,
who tried to go to the moon
by strapping rockets to a chair.
So the legend goes, and disappeared. He obviously blew up.
That was sort of a funny story we thought would actually make sense
for Po to try and emulate
in his desperate attempt to try and get in to see his heroes.
He's such a fan. He's the ultimate fan boy.
And so this is an expression of how much he cares about the Five,
how much he cares about kung fu.
He's willing to blow himself up to get in there.
It's the thing he does that causes him
to get into the right spot.
He creates his own destiny by being a fan.
Sometimes people say, "He landed by accident."
But, as Oogway says, "There are no accidents."
Early in story, Po was going to land directly on top of Tigress.
We wanted to make it clear Oogway was choosing Tigress.
That pointing finger was landing on Tigress when Po landed on her.
But it actually was too...
It was a little bit too much, story-wise,
to have him land on her.
She's a kung fu master, she should be able to have her wits about her.
It became better to have him land directly in front.
It's something we tried a few different ways.
But it's one thing we didn't clarify as much as possible.
That Tigress is Po's favourite.
Makes Tigress' fairly cold treatment of him
more painful, that was the idea.
All those scenes of celebration are incredibly difficult and elaborate.
Sequences involving tons of effects.
But our amazing effects crew pulled it off beautifully.
I think when we first suggested confetti,
everyone was like, "Do we really need confetti?"
We were like, "Yes!"
We really need confetti.
Markus Manninen and Alex Parkinson
were hugely responsible
for handling all the technical challenges,
from clothing to confetti to all the difficult aspects.
We wouldn't have any of the cool stuff without those guys.
So this is the first time we get to hear Angelina Jolie
in our film as Master Tigress.
And she really did an incredible job
of creating a very rich character.
We wanted to have really interesting scene transitions.
We worked hard on finding creative ways
of getting from one scene to another.
This change of locale to Mongolia,
which is where the prison is set,
was very critical.
Again, it's the introduction
in the body of the story.
The blue presence of Tai Lung.
The whole scene
is lit primarily blue for Tai Lung.
With contrasting red,
which became our power colour.
But it was very important to do as many things as possible
to tell you that you're in a different world.
No longer in the Valley of Peace, which is sunny,
you were somewhere far away, somewhat hostile...
We wanted to feel not only the threat, and to feel like
he was this villain that was kept far away,
but we needed to establish Tai Lung as a ticking clock.
We needed to feel like he was as far away
from the valley as possible because
we have all this story that we need to tell with Po,
and that needs to happen in the Valley of Peace.
We needed to have a psychological separation between those two locations.
Another of our story artists,
Rob Koo, who came up with the idea of taking the Great Wall of China
and wrapping it around the interior of a hollowed-out mountain.
So, those two visual ideas became
the basis for Chorh-Gom Prison.
And "Chorh-Gom Prison" means
"sitting in prison," or "in prison."
So that's one of our
little in jokes.
Commander Vachir, which is a Mongolian name,
which means "thunder bolt,"
played by Michael Clarke Duncan, the man with the biggest voice in the world.
A voice so deep you can rearrange your internal organs as you listen to it.
We wanted somebody hugely powerful, which Michael is.
Everything about I, like the rhino commander,
his guards all had to be...
It takes 1,000 of these guys to keep Tai Lung in place.
We should point out the arm our he's locked in was created by Rob Koo.
He came up with this great idea that Oogway
designed this tortoise-shell arm our
that encased Tai Lung
and had acupressure,
these dragon-headed pins poking...
To screw up his chi flow.
And basically paralyse him
and keep him absolutely...
Plus, he's anchored to two huge rocks.
Apparently chained to his cuffs.
Something you'll see later when he escapes.
This feather has been falling for quite some time, gently floating down.
And then when we come back, we contrast back to good times,
happy times.
A great moment to shout out to John Powell and Hans Zimmer,
who did an amazing job with our score
in helping us to create that contrast,
the contrasting feel we wanted to get from the prison
back to the Valley of Peace.
We wanted to use all the story-telling tools we could
to make sure we were getting the contrast between
the darker moments in our movie and the lighter moments.
This yin and yang balance between aspects of the film.
John and Hans gave us
what we always dreamed of having in this movie,
which was a great orchestral score.
We were trying to create
a self-contained universe and a timeless story,
we didn't want to have contemporary songs on the soundtrack.
We were very lucky that
Hans and John wanted to work together.
They gave us more score than we could ever dream of.
It's a score we love deeply.
It has many very beautiful cues.
I'll just say this sequence is very special to me.
We took inspiration from...
I was up at the Skywalker Ranch once.
A friend of a friend got me in, I'm a huge Star Wars geek,
and I was creeping around inside the main house
and looking at all the artefacts.
The light saber, Indy's hat.
I remember being terrified that at any moment
someone was going to come in,
"What are you doing? You're not supposed to be here!"
Carefully wanting to soak up as much as possible,
and I think it's funny that I'll see that played out as a panda.
It was a great way of showing
Po the giant fan boy,
in the home of the most sacred artefacts of kung fu.
He knows everything about this stuff. He's read everything, knows the history.
And that's why it was important for Po to run in
and be spouting out stats about this stuff. He doesn't have to read the card.
He knows exactly what this stuff is.
And then, when he knows what the Wuxi Finger Hold is,
that, of course, is the ultimate total minutiae,
as far as kung fu is concerned.
He actually knows all about it.
Knows who created it, knows when it was developed.
That actually, you can see, it slightly impresses Shifu.
But Shifu has much more hatred for Po in this moment,
he can't appreciate the fact that this guy actually knows his stuff.
The Wuxi Finger Hold used to come later in the movie,
when Shifu was trying to restrain Po from leaving.
And it originally started as a Chinese finger trap.
And then Derek changed it to this thing he made up, the Wuxi Finger Hold.
And we love the idea that the most scary thing,
the most scary kung fu move,
in our world of martial arts,
is this tiny thing of holding your finger.
-Holding your finger up. -How ridiculous.
Now we come into, Po gets to witness
the coolest thing he's ever seen in his entire life.
He didn't get to see the show earlier, now he gets to see the Five.
It's his own private viewing of the Five doing kung fu.
And we wanted to make this really intense, really hardcore.
We wanted to make it very dramatic,
like he was stepping into a torture chamber.
These guys can
avoid all the torture, but we know what's coming for Po.
We spent a lot of time looking at movies like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin,
and any of those great movies that have rigorous training.
Sort of...
Training halls, kwoons,
to make kung fu heroes work.
All our training devices are based on animals.
No human beings in our world.
We took all things, like Shaolin Wooden Men,
even those spiky things that swing over...
We call them pork swings. They are actually porcupines.
Those snakes that go over the water.
They rotate and you have to balance on them.
Those are actually based on snakes.
The rings hanging from the ceiling are snakes, as well.
With tiger claws.
Originally, the fire floor,
we used to see cutaways of palace geese, underneath the floor,
-operating the mechanism. -Pedalling bikes and stoking fires.
But it was just too distracting to do that.
Jack really found Po in this sequence.
And in the previous sequence when we were recording early on,
we had a more abrasive version of Po.
And in this sequence is when he really
brought the more insecure character out.
The real vulnerable character and the sweeter character.
The character that doesn't think he's going to just walk in
and show everybody how it's done, but the character who's terrified
to reveal that he doesn't know how to do kung fu.
This was actually the first sequence we put into production.
We called it our "panhandle" sequence. It was the first scene
that had character acting and action and kung fu and slapstick comedy.
So it was a very good sequence to try and see the technical problems
we were going to be faced with, and acting problems.
It was the first scene that was lit, as well.
We ended up, many months later, going back and relighting it.
In a more aggressive style.
It was too conservative the first time around.
So we went with a red sky.
We asked Ramone to really take a chance and make a bold statement.
And he was doing amazing bold statements in other sequences,
that we said, "Let's hit this again."
Something that happens with the very first things you start with,
even the animation often gets more sophisticated
or more subtle or more pushed.
So we revisited it to make it stronger.
To use our colour theory, once we decided red was our power colour,
we hit the scene with red
to reinforce the power of the Furious Five.
This is their home, contrasting to Oogway's home, green in knowledge.
This is all about strength and power.
And just in case anybody wonders
what the words are on the hanging tapestries
around the training hall,
the words say, "Focus. Harmony. Honour.
"Sacrifice. Courage. Power.
"Agility. Speed. Grace. Balance."
This is our great Dewey Finn moment. We wanted to have Po react
to overhearing the Five.
He's a self-aware character who knows that he's out of place.
Also, another shout out for matte painting,
most of that exterior is all matte painting.
There's very little stuff that we actually built there.
The whole bunkhouse and all the background
is matte painting.
It's also the reinforcement of the negative blue colour.
This is not a good time for Po.
So, just as we'd use blue for something overtly evil, like Tai Lung,
we also use blue
for when Po is having a negative emotion.
The earliest version of this sequence was done by
our storyboard artist, Paul McEvoy.
He came up with this idea that Po would just be in their bedrooms,
without them even knowing it. It started with Po face to face with Mantis.
It was just Po being the creepiest fan ever.
You know, kind of lurking around.
A huge shout out to David Cross, as well.
He plays Crane so perfectly, dry,
in contrast to Jack's nervy energy.
A lot of what David did was adlib, too.
There wasn't much on the page, and he kept adding bits here and there.
We wish there was more Furious Five in our movie.
One of the things we're sort of sad is, they don't get more screen time.
But we love the Furious Five.
Everybody who was a member of the Furious Five,
which were a nod to the Five Deadly Venoms, obviously,
but David Cross and Lucy Liu and Angelina
and Seth Rogen and Jackie Chan,
we loved them all and wished they had a chance to have more screen time.
We used to have a bunch of vignettes
as Po sneaks down the hall.
He's trying to get to an empty room.
We used to have things where we would see into Mantis' room,
Viper's room, and we would see that they would hear him coming.
And they would do anything to avoid having him come into their room
and talk to them.
We had silly stuff like
Lucy pouring tea on her...
Trying to look like she was in the shower.
Mantis hiding under the bed, rubbing those things...
To sound like a cricket, so it sounded like nobody was in there.
We cut it out.
Probably for the better.
Po eats when he's upset.
And the peach tree, we'll talk about it more when we get to that sequence,
in the scene we call "Oogway departs,"
but that became the key location for that sequence.
We realised, once we knew that Oogway
was going to have this very beautiful death scene,
that we had to introduce the peach tree earlier.
We changed the kitchen location
to be Oogway's peach tree.
The peach is a symbol of immortality in Chinese culture,
peach blossom and peach tree leaves
are used in Taoist magic.
The wood of the peach tree is said to ward off evil.
So, in our mythology,
it was Oogway who planted the peach tree
1,000 years ago when he first came to China.
And his staff is made from the wood of the peach tree.
The peach tree is the place that overlooks the valley,
and is this very significant place.
One other thing to mention is that Oogway brings light.
It's a moment of enlightenment between Oogway and Po.
So it was a really cool visual thing
to have him bring the lantern and leave light behind.
It also was a good transition.
He's in the same colour language, blue and sort of orange.
We go from the blue of the night sky and the orange of the lantern
to the golden orange of Tai Lung's eyes
in the cut to our first big action set piece
in the film.
While we're in the land of colour,
this whole sequence was designed to be a battle between
blue, Tai Lung's colour, and red, the power colour.
If you watch the scene a couple of times, you'll notice that
as Tai Lung wins each level,
'cause the thing is designed like a video game with levels,
as Tai Lung wins each level, he extinguishes all red light behind him.
So that was one of the big, overriding conceits for the sequence.
And hopefully, if we make you believe the physics and the gravity
of all the stuff with Tai Lung in the hand-to-hand,
you'll accept that he can defy the laws of gravity in the end,
when he starts to run back up the falling debris.
Which is obviously a complete and utter cheat,
but it is designed to show how amazingly skilful he is.
We should call out the sound designers who did an incredible job.
Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl.
They approached this like King Kong, Transformers and Lord of the Rings.
Gave us a really amazing, huge, epic soundtrack.
We really wanted to bring them in,
as we did with many of our other creative people on our team,
to say, "Let's make this a real movie. Let's try to push the boundaries
"of what a family animated film can be."
The first time we get to hear Ian McShane's voice come out of Tai Lung,
and we realise he's actually a thinking,
a very smart and real being, not just a feral beast.
That was a conscious choice, to have him not say anything
until he's beaten his challenge.
The only thing you would hear would be actual animal sounds,
you might think he was just bestial.
Ian is one of the most amazing actors.
He made our job completely redundant.
"Could I get a cup of tea, love?"
He comes in as the nicest guy in the world.
And then, every single take,
from A through Z,
he'll find every single possible way of delivering a line.
And when he's finished he just looks at you through the control room glass
and goes, "Did I miss anything, love?"
And you'll go, "No. No, that was great. Let's move on."
Nails it every time. Brilliantly.
Halfway through production, we were really trying to find Tai Lung.
I was looking back at The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
and it talks about
a villain is the hero of his own story.
And that's perfect for Tai Lung,
because he thinks he's been unjustly imprisoned for 20 years.
He wants that Dragon Scroll, that's his third act.
In his mind, he's going to get that scroll,
everything's going to be great, and people will understand.
And finally, he'll be able to be the hero the way he wants it to be.
Reconciliation with the father, Shifu is the father figure.
And, I think, villains aren't interesting unless...
Unless there's a human component to the villain
that makes you understand
why they believe they're justified in their villainy.
We actually freaked people out.
Then we kept getting the note of, "He's too dimensional, too human.
"There's too much going on."
"I've got too much sympathy for Tai Lung."
There's a balance we had to strike. We wanted you to engage with him.
And believe him as a villain.
At the same time, we didn't want him to be totally sympathetic.
That's why we ended up putting in an abstracted version of a massacre
in the flashback scene, which will be coming up.
Because people felt bad for Tai Lung.
He wanted something and he was denied it,
locked away in this hideous prison for 20 years.
So we realised we hadn't done a good enough job of
justifying why Tai Lung had to be incarcerated.
So we put in this abstracted version of him running amok
in the valley.
So, we wanted Tai Lung to cast a literal shadow
over the second act of the movie,
and also the valley.
We weren't going to cut to him travelling back from the prison,
so we worked on the transition from his escape
into this next sequence.
So that subliminally,
his shadow burns over the landscape of the valley,
to indicate his coming threat.
Another moment with the Five,
just a little bit of glue for Po's story,
to get us back into his story.
There was a great gag where Po was asleep.
He had been trying to do splits all night, and ended up falling asleep,
'cause he got stuck. We changed it. It was too confusing.
Too much story going on.
Obviously, he took Oogway's words to heart.
And decided to take the next day as a challenge and come.
This is where Shifu... It's dawning on him
how much of a fan this guy is.
He's not going to quit.
He keeps trying to turn up the heat, to scare him away,
trying to raise the intensity of his attack on Po.
He can't do it overtly,
because that would be going against Oogway's wishes.
And this sequence is all about Shifu turning up the heat
and this gag right here, when Po hides the piece behind his back.
I think that was something Rodolphe had boarded early on.
-It was a Rodolphe gag. -It made us laugh.
We got the hugest crew laugh every time, so we worked hard to make sure
we maintained that all the way to end.
In the land of reincorporation,
seeing Tigress do that combat split kick,
and hearing Shifu say,
"It takes years to perfect a split,"
obviously is going to pay off later in the movie.
So, here we get some more kung fu coming from the Five.
Just snippets, but we continue to establish the slapstick...
What happens whenever Po tries to do kung fu,
we get this slapstick result.
But Po's indomitable spirit
keeps freaking Shifu out to no end.
That thing where Po is being flipped around,
that comes from Atom Ant,
an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon,
where bad guys would get beaten up
by this ant that was too small to see.
We just used that for Mantis beating the snot out of Po.
One of his special abilities is he's almost invisible.
We tried it with a green smear, we talked about it.
-It was less interesting. -It's very funny to not see him.
And this moment is a pretty intense moment for Po,
which starts our bouncing down the stairs
running gag that we'll see later in the film.
It should be pointed out,
this moment was heavily scripted over and over again.
We finally figured out what we needed to do here
when Seth Rogen adlibbed that amazing line.
Seth ended up rewriting and adlibbing all of his lines,
to the betterment of the movie.
He's hugely responsible for...
Mantis doesn't have a lot of screen time, unfortunately,
but Seth made every moment count.
Just his big throaty laugh
coming out of a little insect would always make us crack up every time.
But, when he adlibbed, that was when the pieces fell into place
around his great adlib about Po bouncing on the stairs.
This sequence was story boarded by Rob Koo,
another continuation of his acupuncture idea.
We've got the acupressure on Tai Lung in the tortoise-shell arm our,
and this was a continuation of that same idea.
We thought it would be perfect for Mantis.
Initially, he was going to use his thingies to do acupuncture,
but we felt it was better to do needles.
We're laying the pipe for the fact that
Mantis can't reach his pressure points with his acupuncture needles,
for how he's going to stay invulnerable to Tai Lung.
Will Tai Lung's Nerve Touch work on Po?
Well, we'll have to find out.
Angelina's fantastic in this scene.
This is her big acting moment
where she reveals she's this
fairly tough, stern,
unforgiving presence in the film.
But you find out she's nursing a wound.
She has a psychic wound of her own.
We had this back-story, that Shifu raised Tai Lung,
we didn't want the characters talking about it.
So we came up with this idea to actually show it.
And to go into...
Tigress is a very one-dimensional character,
two-dimensional character, to give us all this rich back-story,
and by accident, she's defending Shifu in this moment,
but by accident she ends up revealing all these deep secrets about herself.
It's also Po's awareness of himself
is starting to cause these other characters
to have more awareness of themselves.
It's brilliant, the one-to-one
correlation between
when Tai Lung is a kid and being trained by Shifu.
So, again, in the land of visual motifs,
just wanted to point out that
the Nerve Touch that Oogway does to Tai Lung
is based on the water ripple.
We saw an energy version of the water ripple
when he used his staff to still the waters in the moon pool.
And that same energy ripple
will be something that we use again in a very different way towards the climax.
Which I'll point out when we get there.
We wanted to mirror Tigress and Tai Lung as children,
as closely as possible.
She hits the dummy in the same way,
but Tai Lung actually knocked a weapon out of the weapon rack,
whereas Tigress just caused it to spin.
So Tai Lung's actually a little bit better than Tigress.
Coming up here we have some great
subtle animation between the two of them.
This is a subtle moment that gives way
to a very slapstick and ridiculous moment, boarded by Rob Koo.
This is probably the biggest laugh in the movie
where we reveal the pin cushion on the back.
And then we segue into a very different moment with Shifu.
We wanted to show him, the disruption in his life,
and how he is not a Zen Master, he's trying to be.
And Alessandro Carloni did an amazing job
of animating the subtlety in this scene of Shifu's amazing kung fu hearing
disturbing his meditation.
Also, in that opening shot, you'll see the pressure of blue on negative colour,
pressing down on Shifu's little bubble of warmth,
which is about to be popped by the news from Zeng.
It's a big thing in a movie, any movie,
but particularly in a family film,
to make the decision to kill off a character.
When we knew that it was going to be good for the story to do that.
It actually changed a lot of the tone of the film.
It meant that we were going to have to be...
-It got deeper. It got richer. -You can't do that in a trivial film.
But he knows Shifu's struggling. He's seen Shifu struggling for many years.
Like a great therapist, he doesn't ever give the answers.
He's always gently guiding.
I think this is a moment where we like to think it's very clear
that right here Oogway makes his decision to leave,
because he knows that Shifu isn't going to be able to do it
as long as Oogway's around to be a crutch and to be relied on.
Oogway knows, "It is my time."
Oogway chooses this departure time. I'm getting goosebumps.
It's a beautiful, emotional moment. It's a significant moment in the story.
I think it was one of those sequences early on that
was a real proof of concept for how deep and emotional our movie could be.
And how we wanted to make something
that was taking the story seriously.
We didn't want to be a parody, a spoof. We didn't want to be jokey.
We wanted to be significant and deep and rich.
And our actors, Randall Duk Kim and Dustin,
we really asked them to dig in for the sequence,
to make it heartfelt, to make it believable.
Dustin had to be anguished and conflicted.
And Randall had to be the enlightened being...
-Calm. At peace. -...accepting of...
For Oogway this is a new adventure. It's not a bad thing
that he's moving on.
There's a more interesting adventure awaiting him
on some other plane of existence.
He's okay with it. It's Shifu who's very not okay
with losing his mentor, his master, and his safety net, really,
for everything that's about to come.
And also, there's some back-story where
Oogway knows that Shifu's destiny is to be the next Oogway,
and I think Shifu spent a lot of his young career
probably hoping to be the Dragon Warrior himself.
It wasn't until
he believed he failed, he wasn't good enough, didn't believe in himself,
which is thematic to the film, that he became a teacher.
And he thought, "I'm going to raise, create the next Dragon Warrior."
Shifu's been on this track of, "I failed at my mission."
But Oogway's, "No, there is a greater mission for you."
Which is why Oogway gives him his staff and says...
"You're now me.
"You need to take over the role of..."
Which Shifu doesn't get. Shifu doesn't understand.
He's using it as a weapon.
He'll actually go on to use the staff in a forceful way that is
very strange.
And now we come to the sequence we cursed early on in production
by naming it "Fun in the Kitchen."
The sequence is not fun.
It actually is fun now.
For many years it was the absolute opposite of fun.
It was the least funny sequence you've ever seen.
The core ideal of Shifu, after the death of his master,
finding Po doing something ridiculous,
that was the core idea, to have Shifu coming from this horrible thing
into everybody laughing,
the Furious Five with their feet up on the tables, eating,
they're breaking their kung fu diet.
We wanted to have the reality come slamming into Po.
And actually, I think it was Phil Craven
who first boarded the idea that Po makes fun of Shifu.
And we expanded on that.
So, Po starts imitating Shifu.
I think it's brilliantly animated.
It's mocking, but if you listen carefully,
he's making fun of himself. He's using Shifu as the vehicle,
but he's actually being self-deprecating.
And I think that's one of the great things about Jack
and Jack's performance in this. He's never lashing out at anyone but himself.
It's this consistent thing that he does.
And because we needed this to be fun,
we have the famous joke, "the boob bowls."
The biggest laugh in the movie usually is...
Back in the day!
It used to be this sustained laugh that would just go on and on.
-Much to our surprise. -We test screened to kids,
and kids went nuts. They laughed for a minute straight.
And actually we should put that soundtrack
on the DVDs as an Easter egg.
They laughed for a minute straight. It was the craziest thing.
They were climbing over the seats, talking to their friends about it.
And Jeffrey Katzenberg was at that screening.
I remember him turning and looking at us.
There was no way we were cutting that scene.
It's there forever.
This next sequence was the hardest one to get right.
We knew we had this big comedic laugh coming when we see Po running away.
But the drama between these guys and what gets said,
in this moment of sheer panic on Po's part,
and truly it's panic on Shifu's part,
because he's made this commitment to Oogway,
and he doesn't know how he's going to pull it off.
We did many versions of this sequence.
This scene existed as a card.
There was always a scene we had to have in the film
called "Po and Shifu have it out."
Jed Diffenderfer did the earliest version when it involved a punching bag.
It was more of a training sequence.
We went through so many versions of trying to get this scene right.
It was the last sequence we put into production.
We knew that because we were having such trouble
trying to get the balance right, it would be the last thing we did.
We recorded it more times than any other scene,
with Jack and Dustin.
Jack was always like, "This one again?"
"Didn't I do this great already?" And he always did.
And it was us, we kept monkeying with it, changing the writing
and trying to change the status shift,
it's the status transaction between these two characters.
Po, who was desperate to stay,
who now is desperate to leave, 'cause he knows his life's in danger.
Shifu, who's made this commitment to his master,
who is committed to having Po stay and trying to believe in him,
and so they've flipped places here.
Getting the actual chemistry and balance right was very challenging.
And also finding this no-man's-land to set this in.
It's not the dojo. It's not the palace.
It's this area near the peach tree,
so we're reminded of Oogway in this spot,
but really it's a moment where these two characters
bare their souls and reveal their deepest, darkest flaws.
Po reveals that he doesn't believe that he can do it.
That this was all just a lark and...
Shifu reveals that he doesn't know how to do it,
even though he has committed to believing...
These two characters need each other to complete their journeys.
They need each other so bad...
But they don't know how it's going to work at this point.
-So this is their... -It's a giving up.
...in a sense, emotionally, this is their darkest point.
And then Tigress will pick up the charge.
And that is always what we wanted to have.
That we saw the fracture earlier in the kitchen,
when the Furious Five know...
And she makes a plea to Shifu, "Come on, give me my shot.
"Let me do it. I'm your best student. We're all trained.
"You equipped us to do this."
I think she's completely shaken
when he rejects her 'cause of his promise to Oogway.
She's defying her master, she's defying Oogway,
going against everything she's ever learned.
She's the most disciplined, honourable of all warriors,
and also in this moment we get to see how amazing she is.
And so we want the audience to believe that
-Tigress is going to do it. -They're going to succeed.
-They're going to join up. -Like a team of superheroes.
We want you to think, obviously,
this crack elite force going out to take down the bad guy
has got a huge chance of success.
This location and moment is affectionately known as
"Mopey Mountain" to our crew.
Mike Mitchell coined that term because we used to have one more instance
of Shifu sitting upset and not sure what to do.
And we pared it down and went for the simpler one moment
of despair before enlightenment.
And that comes in the sound.
Talking about the sound, yes, Shifu has kung fu hearing. We established that.
Theoretically he should know where the sound is coming from
and not go to the kwoon to see if Po's there.
He should know where it's coming from, but it worked better
for him to go to the place he expects it be,
which is the training hall, and then to find that Po's actually in the kitchen.
It's actually very symbolic for Shifu because
he's spent his whole life thinking he knows the answer,
thinking he knows the right way to do things.
He thinks those sounds should be coming out of the dojo, but really
this is the beginning of Shifu starting to look at things a different way.
Starting to think outside his box.
His box is the training hall.
He had to hit rock bottom in order to be able to be aware enough,
have his eyes open enough, to see that Po can do things in a different way.
This moment right here, when he sees Po in the splits...
Harking back to that split that Tigress did in combat,
Shifu says, "It takes years to get that right." Po can get that right
when he's not thinking about it, if he's thinking about something else.
Po has this internal ability, this natural ability,
because of his love for kung fu, his obsession with it.
And it only can show itself when he's distracted.
Now we get to see him distracted by food.
This is part of Shifu's rebirth and re-inspiration as a teacher.
He takes him outside of his box, the training hall,
to our equivalent of Wudang Mountain in China.
A very mystical place,
home of many Taoist monasteries,
and often the home in martial arts movies
and stories
of the place
where kung fu reaches its highest level.
But it was really important for us to take Shifu as a character
out of his normal, everyday life,
and he is now changing. It's a rebirth.
He goes back to this place.
This is the birthplace of kung fu.
It's where Oogway invented I, taught Shifu,
then Shifu went and created the box, the dojo,
and started creating a fabricated version of this.
This is a very significant moment for Shifu,
to start turning this corner, becoming more like Oogway,
more open to the possibilities of the universe.
Then we get to see Oogway doing kung fu, which is cool.
The only time in the movie.
You'll see there's a lot of lighting stuff in here.
The scene starts with being pretty misty,
'cause Po's in a fog, he doesn't know where this is going.
And then it transitions to the sun breaking through.
Which is back to our use of gold as a heroic motif
for the flashback to Oogway at the point where he invented kung fu.
Also for Shifu's symbolic rebirth
and his declaration that he is Po's master.
That he is invested and invigorated,
committed to making Po a success
on the same place where Oogway created kung fu.
This is a great example of... We didn't try to reinvent the genre.
There's a training montage in every sports movie.
In every great kung fu origin film,
there's a great hero training.
So we said, "We're going to find our version of that.
"We're not going to reinvent it.
"We're certainly not going to do a really long one..."
No, we needed to compress time.
We wanted to show you this unlocking happened over a long period of time,
so that it's believable that, at the end, Po has unlocked all these abilities.
We don't know exactly how long it takes, it doesn't really matter.
-Don't do the math, people. -It doesn't really make sense.
It's just the idea that they went away,
and they took as long as it took for Po to get where he needed to go.
We're coming to the chopstick fight,
which is, hands down, the audience favourite at every screening.
It's the proof of concept sequence that, when we first executed it,
everybody knew that this was the film in a nutshell.
The great relationship between Po and Shifu.
And this sequence actually started many years ago.
Rodolphe Guenoden had boarded it as a fight between Tai Lung and Shifu.
It was a contained fight at a dinner table.
It was a James Bond meets the super villain thing.
They were being polite to each other as they talked about their back-story,
but trying to dominate each other as they
tried 10 steal food out of each of her's chopsticks.
Then when we realised that Po's training was going to be food-based,
we remembered and brought that sequence back,
and a story artist named Phil Craven, who was trained by Rodolphe in story...
-How very apt. -Yeah.
He took the sequence and made it new,
and actually exploded it and made the epic version.
So it starts very small and goes big.
Phil, I think, did an amazing job.
He boarded the previous sequence, too, the training montage.
Giving us this believable arc
from the panda who doesn't know how to do anything,
to the panda who manages to figure out
how to unlock and use his abilities by the end of the sequence.
What was really cool was when Jack saw the finished movie he pointed out
he didn't realise how layered and
significant some of these moments were.
So the "I'm not hungry" moment really resonated and plays great.
We get applause in some of our audience screenings.
Again, the chopstick fight
had a lot of very careful thought in the visual design of that sequence.
Again, it's lit with gold light.
We don't have any conventional skies in our film
until our very last sequence, at the end with the credits.
A very deliberate choice, every sky is there for an emotional reason.
That one was a bright yellow sky
because it's Po's becoming a hero.
Also, there's a lot of red in the trees.
Again, our power colour.
So, the mix of those colour elements became a significant thing
in the visual design of that sequence.
And now we're coming up to one of the biggest set pieces in our film,
one of the coolest, most ambitious...
This sequence took forever to figure out,
not only how to do this particular sequence,
but what this sequence was going to be. It was another one of those scenes
we knew we had to have the Five fight Tai Lung.
So, love the way Ian McShane
plays Tai Lung
when he's talking to Tigress.
Here, the bridge is being cut. Basically they're both in danger
of being plummeted into this bottomless abyss.
And he's so nonchalant and self-possessed.
The animators did a great job of just having him lean casually.
Jed came up with that image.
There he is, he doesn't care
that he's thousands of feet above a bottomless precipice.
He can afford to be comfortable and relaxed.
He's cool enough to even walk along the tightrope
without blinking or breaking into a sweat.
And Ian just plays this moment perfectly.
That Tai Lung hears Po's name for the first time
and conjures up
this, obviously, completely incorrect image in his head
that he's got a worthy opponent
waiting for him at the end of his road,
which will be the completion of Tai Lung's hero story.
That Tai Lung bests this guy who's actually worthy of his skill.
Certainly, this is the most technically challenging
and complex sequence.
The dynamics of figuring out the rope bridge moving constantly...
The breakage of the boards.
Characters adjusting their weight on the bridge as it's moving.
The mist is also super-complicated.
Hopefully none of this is self-evident. You should be caught up in the action.
But when we were brainstorming about
what was going to be the venue
for this epic fight between the Five and Tai Lung...
When the idea was proposed to our special effects people,
that it was going to be on a shifting, crumbling, breaking rope bridge,
they all went ashen and white and looked really scared.
And we thought, "Great! Perfect. We don't know how to do that."
-So that means it's worth trying. -Nobody's ever done it before.
-It's obviously really hard. -To figure out.
And really, just to give you an idea of how complicated it is,
Viper, which is the most complicated character in our film,
just because she has So many points of articulation
she's a very complicated rig to work,
and the bridge is, essentially, four Vipers.
Because there's four major ropes to the structure of the bridge.
Just to give you an idea of how
complicated it is for the animators to deal with.
Love Jen's idea
of not seeing Tai Lung
when he flips off the rope.
The rope kind of like attached to
the shark in Jaws ploughing through the mist.
Tail Lung is so good, he's so quick,
that you don't even see him when he does his kung fu spring.
So, in keeping with
the idea that Tai Lung is the hero of his own story,
even though he's mostly in cool colours,
we've kept his eyes golden, our hero colour.
And we used the transition from the gold of his eyes
to the gold of
the sunset here,
because Tai Lung has beat these five masters.
In his eyes,
he is on his journey to be the Dragon Warrior.
And this is another step in his story,
where he is the hero and he has defeated the overwhelming odds.
We wanted to play the drama of
they've all been paralysed and defeated by Tail Lung,
but we wanted the comedy as well of the fact that
these guys are now incapacitated.
And Po has to figure out how he's going to...
Now he's left. He's the only solution to this problem.
We wanted to basically freak Po out as much as possible
by seeing the evidence of what Tai Lung has done to the Five.
So, we go into
a very, very difficult and lengthy scene
that was very hard to get right.
There was a lot this scene had to accomplish.
There were a lot of story points that had to land,
a lot of emotional turns, a lot of things that had to happen.
And so we knew we were trying to pack it all in.
The movie's been building up to this moment
of Po getting this Dragon Scroll.
It's the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. It's this huge moment.
It's the moment that Shifu and Po
believe is actually going to make everything turn out okay.
Po thinks he's going to be transformed.
Shifu is taking steps towards becoming more like Oogway.
By using the staff, he's showing that
he's using Oogway's staff to get the scroll in this way,
that shows he's changing from being
the harsh taskmaster, the kung fu trainer,
to being the more enlightened and involved character.
He's still hardcore, and that's the thing we wanted to have.
This contrast, this combination of Shifu
doing something in a hardcore way with kung fu,
but he's redirecting these petals just on wafts of air.
Also worth noting, not something most people would register,
but it is actually the first time Shifu calls Po by name.
As opposed to calling him Panda.
Which indicates how far their relationship has come.
He's no longer an object, he's a person.
He's a friend, that there is genuine affection.
This is the key scene for Shifu's arc.
It's a guy who was almost trying to kill this guy at the beginning,
drive him away, beat him up, detested him, wanted him out of his sight.
And in this scene he actually
has come so far that he's prepared to lay down his life
to give this guy a chance to fulfil his destiny.
It's where a lot of
the elements of the film come.
Also, it's got a big reversal,
obviously when the scroll is revealed to be blank.
We've been building up the entire movie,
it's been 1,000 years of history in this world
that this scroll contains a secret.
The secret to limitless power.
The thing throughout production,
we tried many things.
Early on in the story we had
the scroll was, at times, the Dragon's sword,
locked in a room we never saw.
It was a box that had something in it.
"The greatest power in the universe is within."
You open the box, it's empty, and then we put a mirror in the box.
We tried many different versions, knowing that
this was the philosophical idea
we wanted to deliver.
But it took us a while to find the exact means to deliver it.
And then once we figured it out,
everything fell into place around that.
It's also worth noting, this is a particularly lovely run of music
from this sequence into the next,
through to the end of the movie.
This little ramp of music that Hans and John did
is particularly gorgeous
and supports all the emotions in the scene.
We love the way the music works here.
And then we go into the big transition into our exodus.
Brilliantly done by Yong Duk,
this use of succession of cuts through the long lens.
"Cause we really wanted to make it feel like there was...
We wanted to find that...
Not too much panic. We didn't want bloodcurdling screams.
We wanted there to be an intensity and energy.
There's definitely an imperative to get out
before the bogeyman returns.
Most of the energy comes from camera and choreography.
The jittery hand held camera.
Especially in contrast to how stately the previous sequence has been.
It really worked well.
That's the Shaw brothers there, two other members of Tenacious D,
-they're stealing a foo dog. -Our favourite dumb joke in the movie.
Nobody sees it and it goes by quickly.
Little red wagon with a giant stone foo dog,
that's the thing they've chosen to try and rescue as they get out of town.
They're morons.
That's one of our way-homers, but it always made us happy.
And then, when we get into Po reuniting with his dad,
this sequence was done by Alessandro Carloni in story.
He came up with the joke of the dad putting the apron back on Po.
It's a brilliant piece of visual storytelling.
For Po's dad, nothing has changed. Everything's back the way it should be.
Po's going to come back to the kitchen. He's oblivious.
He's tying Po back into his old life.
But then, when we get into the emotional content later,
you notice the dad isn't oblivious. He is aware.
That was really important for us to not continuously play the dad for comedy,
but to let there be a significant relationship here.
That doesn't always get talked about.
His dad really does love Po.
I think the very nice piece of storytelling that's very sweet
is that the dad's only way of trying to heal his son,
make him feel better is to use the thing the dad loves the most,
he loves noodles more than anything.
He hopes that by expressing that to his son,
that this will make his son better.
He's trying to heal his son by giving him...
The only thing he's got left.
...the most amazing thing in the world, the secret of the soup.
Truly it's great, he is coming from a place of being noodle-obsessed.
And that he's being himself,
but he ends up, inadvertently,
giving Po the secret.
It's brilliantly played by James Hong. James did a magical job
with the delivery of these lines, making them warm and heartfelt
and sympathetic.
And also, one of our favourite moments that we're very happy with,
one of our biggest laughs in the movie,
when it looks like the film is going to explain
why Po has a goose for a father,
-and... -We skip right past it.
...since it has absolutely no importance to Po's story,
we completely don't do it.
Shifu waiting at the stairs for Tai Lung
as a sort of a Sergio Leone
echo of Once Upon a Time in the West,
the flapping door of the tournament grounds, waiting.
And then literally, in the blink of an eye,
since we've established that Tai Lung can appear
like the bogeyman out of nowhere.
And we think Tai Lung waited
until Shifu blinked in the lightning flash
to choose to make his appearance there.
We wanted to create tension in this moment.
This very still, static camera face-off moment.
With the electricity in the air of the building storm
before the storm breaks.
With these two guys, everything is subtext in this conversation.
Twenty years of everything, actually.
There's not just a lot of hatred there,
there's also love and regret.
There's a great amount of depth in this story.
This is when all the pieces come together, now we get the last flashback.
There's a significant, emotional turning point
that exists in this sequence.
It used to be much longer and more significant.
If you notice, if you look closely,
Shifu is defending in the whole beginning part of the fight.
Defending, defending, and it's not until Tai Lung finds
Shifu's staff,
finds Oogway's staff over at his shrine,
over near the candles,
that Tai Lung realises that Oogway is gone.
That it truly is between him and Shifu.
He asks Shifu, "Give me the scroll," basically is the subtext.
This is the first time Shifu goes on the attack and attacks his son.
Because he's defiled the memory of Oogway by touching the staff.
And the breaking of the staff became a significant one,
in the land of Shifu's journey to becoming Oogway,
and the staff becoming a symbol
of Oogway's wisdom and benignness,
but is now used as a weapon with Tai Lung trying to kill Shifu.
So it's being used in this completely negative way.
And we made the choice to make breaking
the staff a somewhat magical event.
There's a life-force inside that staff.
It's the last part of Oogway.
When that staff is broken
and that light is snuffed out within the staff,
we see the last echo of Oogway.
The petals that are left around the moon pool blow across,
and that distracts Shifu long enough for Tai Lung to get in this sucker kick.
Not a sucker punch, but a sucker kick that pounds him into the wall.
Puts him, basically...
Shifu's running for his life for the rest of the sequence.
When they break out through the roof of the palace,
there was some discussion about whether we needed to do that.
Maybe that was more fight than was necessary.
But Mark and I fought very hard to keep it in.
We felt it added a legendary
and epic quality to the conflict between the father and the son,
to have them burst out into the sky against a crack of lightning.
It was a very important part of the fight,
to take it outside before the final drop back into the fire.
And I think it's all about going more and more epic.
We wanted this to increase...
Completely turning up the volume of this battle
so that we could, in contrast,
get the funniest battle to come on the heels of it.
Yeah, they sort of become Greek gods at that point.
Shifu and Tai Lung fighting in the sky.
And then when Po returns, like you were mentioning,
the new light coming back in,
and the lightness tonally to the story comes back,
we get to see Po now...
Po knows the secret. He understands,
but he has no idea how he's going to win this fight.
He just knows he has to save Master Shifu by distracting Tai Lung.
The one thing Tai Lung wants is the scroll.
The thing Tai Lung wants more than anything in the world
is the power he believes is in that scroll.
Which we all know is nothing. But Tai Lung doesn't know that.
What's interesting here is Po is using the scroll,
he's relying on an artificial...
He's still relying on an external thing to gain the advantage,
so Po hasn't become enlightened yet. We save that for later.
He's still relying on Tail Lung's desire for the scroll,
and he's using that against him. But that gives us somewhere to go in the fight
SO we can have more shape to the fight.
This conceit for the fight,
with the using of the scroll, was a little
Muhammad Ali/Cassius Clay, Joe Frazier,
the rope-a-dope, where Po's wearing Tai Lung down,
as Tai Lung renews his efforts to try and get the scroll.
He's using his weaknesses against him.
He knows Tai Lung wants the scroll.
Physically and emotionally, he's wearing Tai Lung down.
He knows the clincher is going to be when Tai Lung opens the scroll
and understands that Po doesn't have any special magic powers,
he's been bested by a panda.
That's the most humiliating thing. This Panda is standing up to him.
This whole sequence now is the ultimate callback to the chopstick fight.
We've seen the game of keep away and how effective that was.
So Po is using that training he got from Shifu
to do the ultimate game of keep away with Tai Lung.
We spent a lot of time wondering what the shape of this battle was gonna be.
We'd had epic fights, the Shifu-Tai Lung fight, the bridge fight,
and so we were wondering how big and crazy
does this final fight have to be? Do we set it in a volcano or
what's the legendary setting that we're going to have for this final battle?
We realised Po's journey has taken him from his noodle shop
up to the world of kung fu in the Jade Palace.
And so what we needed to do was retrace his steps.
Take him back from the palace,
in fact, the fight ends up at the door
of the noodle restaurant.
So we took it back through all the places that Po had been,
and reincorporated ideas we had seen in the film,
now being repurposed by Po in a different way
to use them as an effective battle against Tai Lung.
Whether it was the fireworks or
the idea of the chopstick battle, now used with woks.
And we're coming up on the most dramatic...
Tail Lung has taken out his aggression on Po
and is desiring the scroll so much that he practically kills Po.
He creates a crater around him.
A circular crater, using our circular language again.
Tai Lung gets the scroll.
The most important thing for us is,
this battle could have gone on for decades.
We joked at one point this would go on for two years...
-The legendary battle. -...across the mountains of China.
And we decided it was more significant to end the battle here
outside the noodle shop
and give this moment, which was a truly heroic moment,
as Po, the noble warrior, offers the answer to Tai Lung.
If Tai Lung were to accept that answer...
A shot at redemption if Tai Lung had listened to Po's wisdom,
he might not get Wuxied into oblivion at the end.
This is also the moment when the playing field has been level led.
Now the secret is out, the scroll is meaningless.
And Po has to stand back up again and fight without any advantage.
Truly use only himself
and what he has within himself
to see how this fight's going to work.
It was important for the shape of the fight to have that change occur,
where Po is now fighting with nothing but his own skills, his own wits.
Everything he's learned from Shifu,
his body...
A lot of people have said, "Po's overweight."
He's not overweight. Po is exactly the right weight for a panda.
And that's why he beats Tai Lung.
Po is the peach.
The soft, squishy peach that Oogway was talking about.
His soft and squidginess, his bounciness,
his absorbency, all the things we've seen, where he bounces down stairs
and can absorb all those things.
His ability to redirect Tail Lung's hard force back against him,
using a martial art principle,
that allows him to win.
A mixture of some real martial arts
and some very Tex Avery stuff.
Here's our most Tex Avery moment in the whole movie,
the cookie cut-out hole that Tai Lung has smashed into.
And what's great is we earned the ability at this point
to be as silly as that,
as ridiculous as that in all the final battle stuff we're doing,
because we've been so grounded throughout.
And we allow ourselves to get to this point
where Tai Lung can climb out of that hole and be messed up
and be still on the attack to Po and Po can get the advantage.
We had a lot of discussion about
what is the final thing that's going to get...
How do we get rid of the villain?
We knew we had this big fight Po would win,
but we didn't know how he was going to win, what he was going to do.
We had a belly blast that sent Tai Lung through 15 buildings
and he ended up in Po's bedroom.
And he looked up and saw all of Po's fan stuff all over the walls
and was completely confused.
That didn't seem enough.
We were questing around for the definitive final thing
that will get rid of our villain.
Again, we found the answer was already in the movie.
Derek Drymon's Wuxi Finger Hold,
which we had implanted as
this formidable, ultimate,
who knows what happens when you drop your pinkie,
in the scene where Shifu and Po first meet.
It was obvious,
or became obvious, it wasn't obvious for a while,
it became a thing we discovered.
That we should see what happens when you drop the pinkie.
And what happens when you drop the pinkie is a mysterious
and obviously somewhat magical event.
It harks back to the circle language of the ripples
and also to the Oogway circular energy
that he used in the Nerve Touches.
It's actually, in some versions of it,
when we were planning it, it ended up looking like an atomic bomb explosion.
We made the choice that, since this is probably
a really masterful kung fu technique,
it shouldn't look that destructive.
It should look magical and benign.
So we used golden light and rings of energy
to hark back to
the water ripples in Oogway's Nerve Touch.
Just on a gigantic scale.
We have no idea what happened to Tai Lung.
It's one of the mysteries of the movie,
whether he's atomised,
or what actually happened to him.
Now we're coming up on my most favourite part of the whole movie,
and it definitely gets the best audience response,
this interchange between
the dying Shifu
and the returning hero.
It's another cliché moment that everyone expects.
The master's going to die. Everyone expects that
we're going to follow suit with what you'd expect in this kind of movie.
And we get a great moment from Dustin
when it's revealed that even in this moment of enlightenment,
he's the same guy, he's still the same character,
and a character can only grow so much, can only have so much insight,
and it's a really touching moment
emotionally, because not only do we feel like he's dying,
but we get this great reversal and it's such a joy that he's still alive!
We cheat unapologetically.
We told Dustin, "Play it like you're dying."
So we make the audience think that.
Every time we've seen the film, we've heard the audiences go, "Oh."
A little kid behind me said, "Mommy, is Master Shifu dying?"
The mom said, "Yes, he is, honey."
And then, when he was still alive, there was a huge laugh.
The mom was shaking the kid, "He's alive!"
He's still the same. So, just to go back to the first time we saw Po,
he was upside down.
Here at the end of the movie, he's back upside down,
in a mix of gold for heroism
and green for wisdom.
He has completed his journey,
under his own terms.
And that says "Kung Fu Panda" behind, in the logo,
the Chinese characters.
The idea here was we wanted to bring back the 2-D
as a call back to the dream sequence.
We wanted to give the characters a curtain call
in this great graphic environment.
Book end the film
with the language we've established for heroes in Po's mind,
the graphic, 2-D language.
Now Po has earned his place in that world, too.
Plus, there's a lot of credits in an animated film.
There's almost 10 minutes of credits. That's a lot of real estate in a film,
which has a brief running time like our film has.
So, we figured if you're gonna have all that time,
we might as well use it to try and do something fun and artistic.
Anybody who's watching the credits
they should be seeing something beautiful.
Our 2-D animators, I mean our 3-D animators on the show
actually got the chance to do some 2-D animation.
All the shots you see of the characters
are done by a lot of our animators that worked on the film.
So it was a great way for them to return to their roots.
Flex that old 2-D muscle
that's been a little bit underused recently.
But I think everyone loves traditional animation.
It was great to not only get the movie in there, but to have
our fantastic animators return to their roots like that.
We also wanted to honour everybody who worked so hard on this movie,
We wanted, instead of just white type scrolling against black for 10 minutes,
which is not particularly interesting to look at,
we wanted to make sure people were looking at the credits,
seeing the names of everybody who worked on the film and made it great.
And actually enjoying doing that.
"Cause it was beautiful art.
We worked with a great company called Shine,
who helped to execute these end credits,
working with Ramone and Tang, our production designer and art director.
That combination of those guys and Shine,
trying to, sort of, continue
the sense that the story of our world continues after this movie.
We didn't want to have the storytelling end.
We have a definitive end to the movie,
but we wanted to give the audience
a little bit more time with the characters.
And hint at some call backs.
We just wanted people to enjoy the continuation.
It's something Miyazaki does in a lot of his films
that we've found inspirational,
that sense that you just drop in to see a story at a particular moment,
but that world was there before you got there
and will continue afterwards. We love that.
We thought it would be an interesting thing to do
to try and indicate
that these are little vignettes, where Po is still working in the noodle shop,
and his father is playing mahjong with Shifu and winning.
Or that Tigress is having a moment with Shifu
so that her story has improved.
Shifu's laughing.
And Tigress is able to have a bit more sense of humour
than we've seen in the film.
All these little moments indicate
the world has changed for the better.
It continues the way it always was.
Because that is what is so nice about Po's story.
Is that he basically is the same guy he was in the beginning.
He's a little bit more of that guy,
because he's allowing himself to take his internal and make it external.
He is the Dragon Warrior but working at his father's restaurant,
serving noodles when he's not saving the world.
And Shifu is still a little bit on edge.
He's trying to learn to be like Oogway every day,
but he's still going to snap at Po.
His dad is still going to care about noodles and love his son.
But everybody is hopefully... Their lives are just a little bit better.
They're little bit more relaxed. They know a little bit more about each other.
And hopefully we feel this world that we're leaving
is left with everybody
knowing more about themselves.
That makes their lives better.
Po, the thing we want people to feel, that we don't necessarily show
is that the world truly has changed by Po's example.
Because everyone has seen
this most unlikely character become a kung fu master.
Now they all hopefully will go back,
whatever they believe or want for themselves, they can pursue it.
He's enlightened everyone. Whether you're trying to be a chef
or an artist, whatever it is,
that Po's example is the most extreme example.
And the most enlightening example.
Po showing the scroll.
If you look, there's a shot of Po
showing the children of the village, these little rabbits,
the blank scroll, so they can see their reflection.
For 1,000 years that secret has been withheld.
And now it's for the world to see. Po is not going to withhold it.
He's going to let everyone see it. He let Tail Lung see it.
That was the lesson
that Oogway had to wait for somebody like Po
to come along to understand,
that a warrior wouldn't have necessarily got there.
Po, not being a warrior,
but Po just being himself, he does understand.
He's allowing everybody to see their true potential.
And hopefully believe
that they can accomplish whatever their dream might be.
Let's thank our editorial department
because it's not just post-production.
They truly are editing the movie from the very beginning,
and they are the last ones to leave the project.
They're like the Marines. First in, last out.
It's amazing.
There's never a break. We're always building towards a screening,
some important deadline,
so they're always working around the clock and on weekends.
I don't know how they do it.
So, to Clare Knight
and C.K. Horness and Jeremy Shipp
and everybody
in editorial, thank you.
There's no movie without you guys.
You worked like champs to make this film happen.
And, of course, the other departments that we should have mentioned,
that we didn't talk about,
we have Alex Parkinson,
he wore many hats on our show.
He did an amazing job of coordinating many painstaking aspects of our film
to make sure that
when we wanted a crowd scene, we'd be able to have a crowd scene.
We'd have those details and bits and pieces taken care of.
A lot of what those guys do is invisible to most people,
because you just accept it as being right and natural,
but getting the cloth to fall over the fur
and to get the crowd to interact with each other,
and not collide or go through or any of those things
that would totally break your belief in the world,
were handled by Alex and his team
completely invisibly.
So you could just enjoy the story. But they were incredibly difficult.
For the most part,
the clothing system was designed
to follow the characters and allow the characters to move a lot.
There was so much hand animation that had to occur
to make all the cloth look perfect.
I love this little moment where Po has got an action figure of himself.
He's now carved his own action figure.
He's now, he really is the theme of the movie,
which is, he is his own hero.
He's his own fan boy.
He's got his own model of himself to prove it.
So, I want to talk about the cookie.
We didn't want it to be a joke. We wanted it to be
an end of the story between Po and Shifu.
Beautifully animated by Ben Willis.
They're friends and Po's question, "Do you want to get something to eat?"
Well, yes, they do and they're doing it under the peach tree,
which is returning to life.
We'll see the new peach tree is starting to sprout.
And we leave our heroes, looking over the valley
as two friends, under Oogway's peach tree.
For me, John Stevenson, one of the directors of Kung Fu Panda.
-And... -Mark Osborne, the other director,
we say thank you.
-Be your own hero. -Yes.
And always, always, look within for the answer.