Kung Fu Panda

The key decision on the 2008 animation directed by Mark Osborne and John Stevenson was about what it would refuse to be. The project started life as a martial arts parody, and Stevenson turned away from it, saying he loved those films and had no interest in making fun of them; he wanted a real one instead. This is legible from the first fight. The jokes are made about Po’s body, never about kung fu, and the combat is played straight, as anyone arriving for a spoof notices at once. The second thing is the design. Production designer Raymond Zibach and art director Tang Heng spent years on Chinese painting, sculpture and architecture alongside kung fu cinema, naming Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of Flying Daggers as sources. The hand-drawn opening, styled after shadow puppetry, uses a different technique from the rest of the film, and those two minutes are more stylised than anything that follows. In China the film passed a hundred million yuan, a first for an animated feature there, and set off a national argument about why the country had not made it. It was nominated for the animation Oscar and lost to WALL-E. Not for you if you want a full wuxia structure. At ninety minutes the villain gets very little screen time.