Mark Osborne
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Filmography
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Directed by Ang Lee
influenced Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Visuals Plot
There are nods to the fighting styles of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, as well as homages to the wire-fu and computer enhanced approaches used in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix .
There’s very little here that conjures up specific scenes—though there are clear echoes of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)—but rather an overall sense of the tropes of the genre.
Kung Fu Panda references underdog sports movies such as Karate Kid and martial arts epics such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and while its storyline might seem familiar (in fact, very familiar if you've seen the recent live-action Jackie Chan/Jet Li hit, The Forbidden Kingdom), there's enough invention and irreverence to make the film feel fresh.
On the plus side, the movie takes itself seriously and doesn’t try to distract its audience with pop culture references that wouldn’t exist in the story’s universe (like the “Shrek” movies).
Though the dialogue is contemporary (and often very funny), it avoids pop culture references and contemporary in-jokes of the Shrek variety.
Blessedly free of the smarmy pop-cultural references of Dreamworks Animation Studios' 2004 release " Shark Tale " and their by-now-long-in-the-tooth " Shrek " series, "Kung Fu Panda" is a snappy, amusingly witty family comedy.
The near genius of the film—big-name stars doing voices to one side—is that it almost completely eschews the snarky postmodern, pop-culture-referencing sensibility that seemed pretty fresh and cheeky when Shrek (2001) first appeared on the scene, but now looks more tired and desperate than a dateless working girl at last call in a dive bar.
After a series of animated features ranging from dull to dismal (the Shrek series, Madagascar , Flushed Away , etc.), Dreamworks cooks up their first good film since Antz (1998).
(After all, it's the place that teamed Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese in "Shark Tale" and loaded the "Shrek" franchise with the dulcet tones of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and Antonio Banderas.)
But Saint-Exupéry’s story is both overextended and crowded out by the final third here, where the girl actually flies the aviator’s old plane into a gloomily all-adult planet of drone-workers (it’s reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil), rescuing the little prince from grown-up drudgery and recalling him to his former child-self and his beloved rose, awaiting him on Asteroid B-612.
The ideas in the main story sometime play out as satire, cut from the same cloth as Brazil (dir.
The aesthetics of the dreary, starless world outside of the prince's fantasy universe seem inspired primarily by the relentlessly gray, boxed-in world of Jacques Tati’s masterpiece of French cinema, Playtime, itself a hymn to the human spirit of ingenuity and individuality in a drab grown-up life.
For the new film, Osborne (“Kung Fu Panda”) and screenwriters Irena Brignull (“The Boxtrolls”) and Bob Persichetti have taken the generally more effective tack of nesting Saint-Exupery’s story within an elaborate framing device set in the kind of modular modern metropolis prophesied by Jacques Tati’s “Playtime,” full of technology and free of wonder.
KFP, from a clever screenplay by ex-King of the Hill writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, is a tribute to the literally hundreds of '70s Hong Kong martial arts dramas that flooded Saturday-morning U.S. TV in the wake of Bruce Lee's success with Enter the Dragon.
This time, though, even with a surfeit of battle sequences riffing on live-action martial arts iconography dating back to "Enter the Dragon," the energy captivates.
Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank (2022)
Directed by Rob Minkoff
influenced by Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Plot Visuals
I’m obviously not the target audience of this film, but even still, I can’t see too many children falling in love with this story that seems to be trying way too hard to copy the success of Kung Fu Panda .
The animation is crisp and refined in a way that keeps most of the action light and breezy in a “Kung Fu Panda” type of way, and the voice work is top notch.
With the direction being taken care of by the hands of Minkoff and Koetsier, the film and its plot points take heavy influences from Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles,” several wuxia films (like DreamWorks’ “Kung Fu Panda” series), and some western movies to portray the film accurately.
A primera vista, Un héroe samurái parece aprovechar el mismo punto de partida que Kung Fu Panda (2008), de Mark Osborne y John Stevenson.
KFP, from a clever screenplay by ex-King of the Hill writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, is a tribute to the literally hundreds of '70s Hong Kong martial arts dramas that flooded Saturday-morning U.S. TV in the wake of Bruce Lee's success with Enter the Dragon.
The screenplay is by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, a duo that has written for TV’s “King of the Hill” and “MAD TV,” from a story by “Bulletproof Monk” writers Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris.
Hoffman clearly relishes his role even more than Black does Po, but he's not given much from screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who were far funnier as scribes for TV's King of the Hill.
"Kung Fu Panda" comes from the creative people responsible for episodes of TV's "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "King of the Hill."
“The Bad Guys” doesn’t feel like a movie we’ve seen before from Dreamworks animation- though there are times I was reminded of the “Kung Fu Panda” films, and it immediately hooked me into the story.
It would be as deceptive as some of these anthropomorphic animals themselves to say that The Bad Guys isn’t easy to read and predict, but it does find an irresistible charm through impressively blending animation styles (Pierre Perifel makes his narrative length directing debut, having previously worked as an animator on respectable projects such as the Kung Fu Panda series) that lends a graphic novel touch to some of the action sequences (especially the fast-paced hand-to-hand combat segments).
Directed by animation department veteran Pierre Perifel (“Kung Fu Panda”) and scripted by Etan Cohen (“Men in Black 3”), “The Bad Guys” begins like cross between “Kung Fu Panda” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.” “The Bad Guys” is set in a fictionalized Los Angeles, where anthropomorphic animals co-exist along with cartoon-like humans.
Pierre Perifel, an animator on the “Kung Fu Panda” movies, makes his feature-directing debut with “The Bad Guys,” working from a screenplay by Etan Cohen (“Tropic Thunder,” Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa”).
A lazily-plotted heist comedy, the directorial debut of Pierre Perifel (an animator who worked on many of the Kung Fu Panda installments) may find favor with children while causing more than a few adults to doze off.
Similar to how Shrek elevated the fairy tale and Kung Fu Panda the kung fu subsect, Pierre Perifel‘s crime caper has a lot of fun playing into the stereotypes we expect from such a genre, pilfering them just so, and layering it with a universal brand of comedy that hopefully allows these Bad Guys to continue on.
Coraline (2009)
Directed by Henry Selick
influenced The Little Prince (2015), Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Visuals
Visually, the first act of the film, with its square trees to match its square houses, reminded me of the suburban rigidity of the first act of Brad Bird ’s “ The Incredibles ,” while visions of the world of the title character reminded me of LAIKA gems like “ Coraline ” and “Paranorman.”
These scenes are a joy to behold — a bliss-out of brightly colored paper and hand-molded clay that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the texturally varied and vibrant stop-motion work seen in Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and Henry Selick’s “Coraline.”
So immense is the artistry that went into these sequences, which include a blend of stop-motion and computer graphics in a stylized approach similar to releases from Laika Studios such as “Coraline” and “The Boxtrolls,” that they could have worked as wordless pieces of the narrative.
I'm tired of wall-to-wall cuteness like " Kung Fu Panda ," and wonder if Selick's approach would be suited to films for grown-ups adapted from material like stories by August Derleth or Stephen King .
The Incredibles (2004)
Directed by Brad Bird
influenced The Little Prince (2015), Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Visuals
Pixar is still the quintessential animation house with the natural realism of “The Incredibles,” “Toy Story (1 & 2)” and the rest.
"Kung Fu Panda" doesn't have the hip, breezy esprit of such Pixar masterworks as "The Incredibles" or "Ratatouille."
In the end, the film isn’t quite up there with the best of Pixar, which still holds the computer-animated crown with the likes of The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
Visually, the first act of the film, with its square trees to match its square houses, reminded me of the suburban rigidity of the first act of Brad Bird ’s “ The Incredibles ,” while visions of the world of the title character reminded me of LAIKA gems like “ Coraline ” and “Paranorman.”
In the real world, it is most readily evocative of a European-tinted The Incredibles, with characters with bubble eyes and proportionate bodies, but also a firmly realistic understanding of the world.
It reminded me of Steve Martin in "The Jerk," where his parents were black, and it never occurred to him to question the matter).
As he does, “The Little Prince” makes a remarkable stylistic leap from the accomplished but familiar CG environs of these opening scenes (big-eyed, bobble-headed humans; modernist-futurist design influences) into 2D stop-motion animation, bringing the world of Saint-Exupery’s original story to life in beautiful handcrafted images based on the author’s own crudely elegant watercolors (seen in the book’s first printing and all subsequent editions).
The oafish-guy-attempts-a-lithe-sport premise has been mined before, most similarly in Beverly Hills Ninja, a fairly awful Chris Farley vehicle that managed to stomp all the fun out of the concept.
A CGI, furry version of Beverly Hills Ninja, then, though a vast improvement over such previous DreamWorks dreck as Shark Tale and the Shrek flicks, thanks to a couple of kinetic action sequences worked out in spatial moves out of House of Flying Daggers and to some uncommonly good voice acting (Black is in routine Baby Huey autopilot, and Lucy Liu, Jackie Chan, and Seth Rogen all barely register, but Hoffman, McShane, and James Hong have delightful bits).
En ese sentido, esta película evoca otros ejercicios animados como The Wall (Parker, 1982), aquella pieza basada en la música de Pink Floyd y que también, muy a su modo, gritaba rebeldía en un mensaje que bien podrían compartir ambas cintas: We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thoughts control….
While there are many genre-specific tropes used to make the story appeal to younger viewers, there is also something about the patience Osborne has for a scene to play out that immediately recalls Brad Bird’s “The Iron Giant” and, to a lesser extent, Gore Verbinski’s “Rango.”
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
Directed by Dean DeBlois
influenced by Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Themes
Other hit films such as Kung Fu Panda and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse are stirring tales of heroism and maturity; recent Pixar classics such as Coco and Inside Out examined the bonds of the family unit through the eyes of kids on the verge of growing up.
Both the original and follow-up sequel earned Academy Award nominations for best animated feature – a feat only matched by Shrek and Kung Fu Panda since the category was created back in 2001.
Unlike Rolland Emmerich and Dean Devilin in their 1998 fiasco, which diminished its GINO (Godzilla In Name Only) into nothing more than an over-sized lizard, director Gareth Edwards and screenwriter Max Borenstein realize that Godzilla’s power lies in his stature – not only physical but also metaphoric.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972)
Directed by William Sterling
influenced The Little Prince (2015)
Plot
Not unlike Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Little Girl falls down the “rabbit hole,” that of The Aviator’s world of a previous century.
Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)
Directed by Carlos López Estrada
influenced by Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Visuals
The film borrows animation tricks from the “Kung Fu Panda” movies — animated rod puppets and shadow puppets illustrate the flashbacks to the “legend” that the movie purports to revive.
The Darkest Minds (2018)
Directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson
influenced by Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Plot Themes
Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who helmed two of the “Kung Fu Panda” sequels before this, takes on her first live-action feature.
Making her debut behind the live-action camera after directing the Kung Fu Panda sequels , Jennifer Yuh Nelson botches the action scenes, including a car chase so incoherently staged that it becomes difficult to track the movements of only three vehicles on a desolate stretch of road.
Still, you’d be forgiven for feeling like we’re covering old ground early on in The Darkest Minds, especially when it features such familiar story elements as “every kid gets put in a group” and it’s all very X-Men, but it’s worth sticking with because Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s (the Kung Fu Panda films) live action debut has visual imagination, energy and an awful lot of heart.
Animator (“Kung Fu Panda”) turned director Jennifer Yuh Nelson treats us to some “Maze Runner” level dystopia — a half-ruined entropic country (the story is set in Virginia), abandoned malls (No kids, no need for malls, right?), legions of locked-up kids paraded, by color, into detention camps.
Nelson, a former animator who has previously directed the Kung Fu Panda sequels, handles the gentler moments more successfully than its ugly ones; when government troops inevitably find the camp, we have to suffer through an unfortunate climax of fire and brimstone before reaching an intriguing ending.
Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“ Kung Fu Panda ” series) isn’t able to elevate the kids’ fight for survival above its melodramatic trappings.