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Written here is the full transcript of DreamWorks Animation's Kung Fu Panda filmmaker commentary.

This commentary features the two directors of the film: John Stevenson and Mark Osborne. Descriptions shown between italicized brackets were written by contributors of this article.

Kung Fu Panda commentary[]


[The screen opens up to the DreamWorks logo.]

MARK OSBORNE
Hi, I'm Mark Osborne. One of the directors on Kung Fu Panda.

JOHN STEVENSON
I'm John Stevenson, the other director on Kung Fu Panda.

MARK OSBORNE
And welcome to the commentary! It's been a long four years.

[Opening 2-D sequence begins with a panda warrior approaching a tavern.]

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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 stylized, 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 contrast that when we go into our computer-generated images with his more gravity-based reality.

OSBORNE
We should also talk about James Baxter, who is the fantastic animator behind this sequence. We were very 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.

STEVENSON
Also, we've got hugely vibrant, saturated colors, 'cause we're going to make the contrast once we go to what's reality in our film. When 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 color palette when we go into reality. It's worth pointing out that this is the first CG movie at DreamWorks to be shot in CinemaScope.

[The 2-D scene disappears as the panda warrior turns into Po lying on the floor in his room.]

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
Dan Wagner did a lot of the 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.

[Scenes changes to the kitchen of the noodle shop, where Po talks to his father.]

STEVENSON
That shadow of Po's father, we put that in the category of one of our way-home type jokes.

OSBORNE
Nobody laughs at it.

STEVENSON
Nobody gets it.

OSBORNE
Hey, can't win them all.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
Originally, Po was working, had a mean goose boss, when he was working as a short order cook. Afred said, "He's not his boss, he's his dad."

OSBORNE
And he was a caring dad, putting his hat on him, putting his apron on him.

STEVENSON
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 only two things in the world he loves, his son and noodles. That's it. He can't possibly imagine why Po would ever want to do anything other than noodles.

OSBORNE
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 down at the Bamboo Forest. He worked at a chime factory.

STEVENSON
There used to be loads of other pandas that lived in a panda village.

OSBORNE
We tried everything until we settled on this idea that he works in his dad's shop.

STEVENSON
And it makes him the outcast, in a sense, there's no other pandas in the film.

[Scenes changes to Shifu playing his flute outside the Training Hall.]

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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 dialogue and character scenes, the cameras are pretty restrained, pretty formal. When we go to our fight scenes, the camera gets more active and dynamic.

OSBORNE
It's a really important contrast, to make sure your guys get a rich experience. Many ups and downs.

[Shifu is seen in the Jade Palace speaking with Oogway.]

OSBORNE
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 guys' amazing."

[Fleeting flashback of Tai Lung appears.]

STEVENSON
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 color. We have a complex color theory in the film. Blue is our negative color, associated with Tai Lung, he's a snow 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.

STEVENSON
And we elected to have, basically, not a common 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 OK.

[Scene changes to Po waiting tables in the noodle shop.]

STEVENSON
I was in the first recording session with 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 floor. That was a huge gift that he brought to the film. And once we saw that, it really made Po as 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.

OSBORNE
Then we have 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.

[Scene shows Po dragging his noodle cart up the steps.]

STEVENSON
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 in the end. But, there's a lot of stairs in our movie.

OSBORNE
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 trued 1,000 different versions of, and finally settled on this version.

STEVENSON
Let's give a shout out to the Shaw brothers, Jack's Tenacious D brothers, Kyle Gass and J.R. Reed.

OSBORNE
J.R. Reed... it's amazing. We got all of Tenacious D in our movie.

STEVENSON
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.

[Scene switches to Oogway and Shifu talking at the Palace Arena.]

OSBORNE
So here when we get in there's actually all these great mechanisms the Furious Five are going to battle. You see them just for a split second, but one of the earliest versions of this sequence, you saw the Five battling these giant mechanical beasts and all these really cool things.

STEVENSON
Buy the game, you'll get to see what they look like!

OSBORNE
Yeah, yeah. But for us 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, you know, for the comedic beats of Po struggling to get in. To not see that stuff.

STEVENSON
There's a couple of lighting choices, like 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 everything he wants. And we also, unapologetically, decided this was going to be a very broad, slapsticky, sort of 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, and they're all wearing incredibly complicated clothing. And we also have other effects, and the shots of the crowd would take, you know, they would be on the render farm for days and days.

OSBORNE
Even when they're out of focus, even when they're in the background, they're just spects of color. They still have to have all their cloth, and everything proper. And it's pretty frustrating, but once we get that stuff right and all those details are right, it really gives a nice, realistic setting.

STEVENSON
I think this sequence took eighteen months to light. It was incredibly difficult.

[Po is trying to get inside the arena to see the tournament.]

OSBORNE
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 the dream. It'd be amazing, so these little glimpses we get here are supposed to tease the audience as much as Po gets teased. Now this sequence came up, our story artists kind of teamed up and did a jam on this sequence. So 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 basically 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.

STEVENSON
And that's based on an urban legend I think. A myth of a sort of low level Chinese official from the Ming dynasty who I think tried to go to the moon by strapping rockets to a chair, so the legend goes, and disappeared. Obviously blew up. But that was sort of a funny story that 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.

OSBORNE
Yeah, he's such a fan. I mean Po is 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. That he's willing to blow himself up to get in there. And it's actually the thing he does that causes him to get into the right spot. He creates his own destiny by being a fan. And sometimes people say, you know, "He landed by accident."

STEVENSON
But as Oogway says, "There are no accidents."

OSBORNE
Early in the story, Po was going to land directly on top of Tigress. We really wanted to make it clear that Oogway was choosing Tigress, and that pointing finger was landing on Tigress when Po landed on her. But it actually a little too much, story-wise, to have him land on her. 'Cause she's a kung fu master, she should be able to have her wits about her, and it became better to have him land directly in front. So it's something we tried a few different ways. But it's one thing we didn't really clarify as much as possible, that Tigress is Po's favorite.

STEVENSON
Yeah. Makes Tigress' kind of fairly cold treatment of him more painful. That was sort of the idea.

[Scene shows Oogway announcing that Po is the Dragon Warrior.]

STEVENSON
All those scenes of celebration are incredibly difficult and elaborate. Sequences involving tons of effects. But our amazing effects crew—

OSBORNE
' — Pulled it off beautifully, yeah. And I think when we first suggested confetti everyone was like, "Do we really need confetti?" And we were like, "Yes!"

STEVENSON
We really needed confetti. And so again, there's Markus Manninen and Alex Parkinson, were hugely responsible for handling all the technical challenges, from clothing to confetti to all the difficult aspects. And we wouldn't have any of the cool stuff without those guys.

[Po is carried away to the palace; an appalled Shifu is approached by Tigress.]

OSBORNE
So this is the first time we get to actually hear Angelina Jolie in our film as Master Tigress. And she really did an incredible job of really creating a rich character.

STEVENSON
Another thing we wanted to do was we wanted to have really interesting scene transitions. So we worked quite 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. And again, it's sort of the introduction in the body of the story of the blue presence of Tai Lung. The whole scene is lit primarily of blue for Tai Lung. And with contrasting red, which became our power color. But it was very important to do as many things as possible to tell you that you're in a different world now. You are no longer in the Valley of Peace, which is warm and sunny. You're in a somewhat far away, somewhere pretty hostile...

OSBORNE
We wanted to feel not only the threat, and to feel like he was this villain that was sort of kept far away, but we needed to establish Tai Lung as a ticking clock. And we needed to feel like he was as far away from the Valley as possible because we have all this story that we needed to tell with Po, and that needs to happen back in the Valley of Peace. So we needed to have a psychological separation between those two locations.

STEVENSON
And another of our story artists, Rob Koo, 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.

[ Zeng is being shown around the prison by Vachir.]

STEVENSON
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 actually rearrange your internal organs as you listen to it. And so we wanted someone hugely powerful, which Michael is. Everything about it, like the rhino commander and his guards all had to be... like, it takes a thousand of these guys to keep Tai Lung in place.

OSBORNE
We should point out too that the armor he's locked in was created by Rob Koo as well, one of our story artists. And he came up with this great ideas that Oogway designed this tortoise shell armor that encased Tai Lung and had acupressure. These pins, these dragon-headed pins kind of poking...

STEVENSON
To screw up his chi flow.

OSBORNE
Yeah, screw up his chi flow and basically paralyze him, and keep him absolutely...

STEVENSON
Plus he's anchored to two huge rocks, apparently chained to his cuffs. Something you'll see a little bit later when he escapes.

OSBORNE
This feather has been falling for quite some time, just gently floating down.

[Scene changes to the Valley of Peace, where Po is being carried into the Jade Palace.]

OSBORNE
And then when we come back, of course we contrast back to good times and happy times, and 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 that we wanted to get from the prison back to the Valley of Peace. And 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, and we were always playing this yin and yang balance between aspects of the film.

STEVENSON
And John and Hans, you know, gave us what we always dreamed of having in this movie, which was a great, you know, orchestral score. We knew we were trying to create a self-contained universe and a timeless story, that we didn't want to have contemporary songs on the soundtrack. And we were just very, very lucky that Hans and John wanted to work together. And they gave us more score than we could ever dream of. It's a score we love deeply, and it has many, many, very, very beautiful cues.

[Po is excitedly gawking at the artifacts in the Hall of Warriors.]

OSBORNE
And I'll just say this sequence is very special to me because we took inspiration from one of the... I was up at the SKYWALKER RANCH once. A friend of a friend got me in. And I'm a huge STAR WARS geek, and I was creeping around inside the main house and looking at all the artifacts, you know: the lightsaber, Indy's hat. And I just remember being terrified that at any moment someone was going to come in and go, "What the hell are you doing here? You're not suppose to be here!" and I'm carefully wanting to soak up as much as possible, and I think it's kind of funny now that I'll see that played out as a panda. STEVENSON
It was a great way of showing Po, you know, the giant fan boy, in the home of the most sacred artifacts of kung fu.

OSBORNE
Yeah, he knows everything about this stuff. He's read everything, he knows the history of this stuff, and that's why it was really important for Po to run in and kind of be spouting out stats about this stuff. He doesn't have to read the card or anything, he knows exactly what this stuff is.

[Scene shows a disapproving Shifu trying to intimidate Po.]

OSBORNE
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. That he actually knows all about it, knows who created it, knows when it was developed . And that actually, you can see, it slightly impresses Shifu. But Shifu has much more hated for Po at this moment, that he can't appreciate the fact that this guy actually knows his stuff.

STEVENSON
And the Wuxi Finger Hold actually 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 that to this thing he made up, called 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.

OSBORNE
Holding your pinky.

STEVENSON
Holding your finger up.

OSBORNE
How ridiculous.

[Po and Shifu enter the Training Hall, where the Five are practicing.]

OSBORNE
And now we come into, Po gets to witness the coolest thing he's ever seen before in his entire life. He didn't get to see the show earlier, so now he gets to see the Five. And 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, we wanted to make it feel like he was stepping into a torture chamber. That these guys can avoid all the torture, but we know what's coming for Po.

STEVENSON
We spent a lot of time looking at movies like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, and any of those great movies that have sort of rigorous training... training halls, kwoons, things to really make kung fu heroes work.

OSBORNE
But all our training devices are actually based on animals.

STEVENSON
Because there's no human beings in our world, so we took all things, like Shaolin Wooden Men, and even those spiky things that swing over the... we call them pork swings, or actually porcupines.

OSBORNE
Those snakes that go over the water. They rotate and you have to balance on them, and those are actually based on snakes, and the rings hanging from the ceiling are snakes as well too, with talons.

STEVENSON
With tiger claws. And originally the fire floor, we used to see cutaways of palace geese, underneath the floor, you know, operating the mechanism.

OSBORNE
Pedaling bikes and making fires.

STEVENSON
But it was just too distracting to do that.

OSBORNE
Jack kind of really found Po in this sequence, and in this previous sequence when we were recording early on, you know, we had a more abrasive version of Po. And in this sequence is when he really brought the more insecure character out, and the real vulnerable character and the sweeter character. The character that doesn't think he's gonna just walk in and show everybody how it's done, but the character who's actually terrified to reveal that he doesn't know how to do kung fu.

STEVENSON
So this is 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 all the technical problems we were going to be faced with, and acting problems. It was actually the first scene that was lit as well, and we ended up, many, many months later, going back and relighting it because—

OSBORNE
In a more aggressive style.

STEVENSON
We felt we were being too conservative the first time around.

OSBORNE
We went with a red sky, and really we asked Ramone to really take a chance and make a bold statement, and he was doing such amazing, bold statements in other sequences, that we said let's hit this again.

STEVENSON
Yeah, it's something that happens when 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, and to use our color theory. Once we decided red was our power color, we hit the scene with red to reinforce the power of the Furious Five. This is their home, contrasting to Oogway's home, which is 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 say, the words say, "Focus. Harmony. Honor. Sacrifice. Courage. Power. Agility. Speed. Grace", and "Balance".

[Nighttime scene shows the Five talking about Po.]

OSBORNE
This is our great Dewey Finn moment. We wanted to have Po react to overhearing the Five.

STEVENSON
He's a self-aware character who knows that he's out of place. Also, worth another shout out for matte painting. Most of that exterior is all matte painting. There's very little stuff that we actually built there, so the whole bunkhouse and all the background is matte painting. It's also, again, the reinforcement of the negative blue color. 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.

OSBORNE
And the earliest version of this sequence was done by our storyboard artist, Paul McEvoy, and he actually came up with this idea that Po would just be in their bedrooms without them even knowing it. It started with Po just face to face with Mantis, and it was just Po being the creepiest fan ever, you know, kind of lurking around.

[Po stumbles into Crane's room.]

STEVENSON
A huge shout out to David Cross as well, because he plays Crane so perfectly dry in contrast to Jack's nervy energy.

OSBORNE
And a lot of what David did was adlib, too, because there wasn't much on the page, and he kept adding bits here and there.

STEVENSON
We wish there was more Furious Five in our movie, quite honestly. One of the things we're sort of sad is that they don't get more screen time. But we love the Furious Five and everybody who was a member of the Furious Five, which were about the Five Deadly Venoms obviously. But David Cross and Lucy Liu and Angelina and Seth Rogen and—

OSBORNE
And Jackie Chan.

STEVENSON
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 trying to get to an empty room, and we used to have things where we would see into Mantis' room and 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, so we had silly stuff like Lucy pouring tea on her...

OSBORNE
Trying to look like she was in the shower. And Mantis hiding.

STEVENSON
And Mantis hiding under the bed, rubbing his... whatever those thingies...

OSBORNE
To sound like a cricket, so it sounded like nobody was in there.

STEVENSON
But we cut it out. Probably for the better.

[A downcast Po is at the peach tree eating peaches; Oogway approaches him.]

STEVENSON
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 realized, once we knew that Oogway was going to have this very beautiful death scene, that we had to introduce the peach tree earlier. So 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 a thousand years ago when he first came to China, and his staff is made from the wood of the peach tree. And the peach tree is the place that overlooks the Valley, and is this very significant place.

OSBORNE
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 kind of cool visual thing to have him bring the lantern and leave light behind.

STEVENSON
It was also a good transition, because he's in the same color language, blue and a sort of orange. And 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. And while we're in the land of color, this whole sequence was designed to be a battle between blue, Tai Lung's color, and red, the power color. If you watch the scene a couple of times, you'll notice that as Tai Lung wins each level —'cause the thing is designed a bit 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 also, hopefully, it we make you believe in 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 skillful he is.

OSBORNE
We should actually call out the sound designers who did an incredible job.

STEVENSON
Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl.

OSBORNE
They approached this like King Kong, and 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 out 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. And the first time we get to hear Ian McShane's voice come out of Tai Lung and we realize he's actually a thinking, a very smart and real being, not just a feral beast.

STEVENSON
That was a very conscious choice, to have him just, to not say anything until he's beaten his challenge. That the only thing you would hear would be actual animal sounds, so you might think he was just bestial. Ian is just one of the most amazing actors. He made our joke completely redundant.

OSBORNE
"Could I get a cup of leave, love?"

STEVENSON
Yeah, 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.

STEVENSON
Halfway through production, we were really trying to find Tai Lung, and one of the things I was looking back at sort of, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and it talks about a hero, that 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 twenty years, and he wants that Dragon Scroll, that's his third act, in his mind, is that he's going to get that scroll and 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.

OSBORNE
Reconciliation with the father, Shifu is the father figure. And I think a villain's not interesting unless there's a human component to the villain that makes you understand why they believe they're justified in their villainy.

STEVENSON
But we actually freaked people out. That we kept getting the note: "He's too dimensional. He's too human. There's too much going on."

OSBORNE
"I've got too much sympathy for Tai Lung."

STEVENSON
There's a balance we had to strike, because we wanted you to engage with him and believe him as a villain, but at the same time we didn't want him to be totally sympathetic.

OSBORNE
Well, that's why we actually ended up putting in an abstracted version of a massacre in the flashback scene, which will be coming up. Because people actually felt, "Well, I feel bad for Tai Lung". He wanted something and he was denied it, and now he's been locked away in this hideous prison for twenty years. And so we realized 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.

[Zeng flies away; Tai Lung stares ahead, casting a long shadow.]

OSBORNE
So we wanted Tai Lung to cast a literal shadow over the second act of the movie, and also the Valley, since we weren't going to cut to him traveling back from the prison. So we worked on the transition from his escape into this next sequence. So that just subliminally his shadow burns over the landscape of the Valley to indicate his coming threat.

[Scene shows Shifu and the Five walking to the training courtyard.]

STEVENSON
Another moment with the Five, just a little bit of glue for Po's story, to get us back into his story. And there actually 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. But we changed it, it was a little too confusing. Too much story going on.

OSBORNE
Obviously he took Oogway's words to heart, and decided to take the next day as a challenge and come.

STEVENSON
And this is where Shifu has... it's just dawning on him how much of a fan this guy is.

OSBORNE
This guy's not gonna quit.

STEVENSON
And so he keeps trying to turn up the heat, trying to scare him away, trying to raise the intensity of his attack on Po, because he can't do it overtly, because that would be going against Oogway's wishes. So this sequence is all about Shifu slowly 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.

OSBORNE
It was a Rodolphe gag.

STEVENSON
It just made us laugh. We got the hugest crew laugh every time, so we worked really hard to make sure we maintained that throughout all the way to the end.

OSBORNE
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 payoff later in the movie.

[Members of the Five "train" with Po; Po remains eager and undeterred through the beatings.]

STEVENSON
So here we get some more kung fu coming from the Five. Just snippets, but really trying to continue to establish sort of the slapstick, what happens whenever Po tries to do kung fu, we get this slapstick result. But Po is an indomitable spirit. Just kind of keeps freaking Shifu out to no end.

OSBORNE
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. And we kind of just used that for Mantis beating the snot out of Po.

STEVENSON
Yeah, one of his special abilities is he's almost invisible. And we even tried it with a green smear. We talked about it.

OSBORNE
It was a lot less interesting.

STEVENSON
Yeah, it's very funny to not see him.

[Shifu is now attacking the still-eager Po; he eventually kicks him out of the courtyard.]

STEVENSON
And this moment is a pretty intense moment for Po, which starts out bouncing down the stairs running gag that we'll see later in the film. And it should be pointed out that this moment was also heavily scripted over and over again, and we finally figured out what we needed to do here when Seth Rogen adlibbed that amazing line.

OSBORNE
Seth actually ended up rewriting and adlibbing all of his lines, to the betterment of the movie. And he's hugely responsible for... Mantis doesn't have a lot of screen time, unfortunately, but Seth made every moment count. And just his big throaty laugh coming out of a little insect would always make us crack up every time.

STEVENSON
But when he adlibbed there, that was when all the pieces fell into place, around his great adlib about Po bouncing on the stairs.

[Scene shows Mantis trying to treat Po with acupuncture]

STEVENSON
And then this sequence was storyboarded by Rob Koo, and it was another continuation of his acupuncture idea. You know, we've got this acupressure on Tai Lung in the tortoise shell armor, and then this was a continuation of that same idea. And 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 actually do needles.

OSBORNE
But also 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.

STEVENSON
Will Tai Lung's nerve touch work on Po? Well, we'll have to find out.

OSBORNE
And Angelina's fantastic in this scene. This is sort of her big acting moment where she reveals she's this fairly tough, stern, unforgiving presence in the film. But you sort of find out that she's nursing a wound. She has a psychic wound of her own.

STEVENSON
We had all this great backstory that Shifu raised Tai Lung, and we didn't want the characters talking about it. So we came up with this idea to actually show it, and to go into, you know, Tigress is a very one-dimensional character, two-dimensional character, to actually give us all this rich backstory. And by accident—she's defending Shifu in this moment—but by accident she ends up revealing all these deep, deep secrets about herself. And it's also Po's awareness of himself, is starting to cause these other characters to have more awareness of themselves.

OSBORNE
It's brilliant, the one-to-one correlation between when Tai Lung is a kid and being trained by Shifu.

[In a flashback scene, Tai Lung rampages the Valley, tries to take the Dragon Scroll, and is stopped by Oogway]

OSBORNE
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 a water ripple. We saw an energy version of the water ripple that we saw 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.

STEVENSON
We wanted to mirror Tigress and Tai Lung as children as closely as possible. So 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 a little. So Tai Lung's actually a little bit better than Tigress... Now coming up here we have some great subtle animation between the two of them. This is a fairly subtle moment that gives way to a very slapstick and ridiculous moment, again, boarded by Rob Koo. And this is probably the biggest laugh in the whole movie, when we reveal the pin cushion on the back... And then we segway into a very, 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.

OSBORNE
Also, in that opening shot, you'll see the pressure of the blue, our negative color, 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. And 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...

STEVENSON
It got deeper, it got richer.

OSBORNE
You can't do that when you're in a trivial film.

STEVENSON
But he knows Shifu's struggling, he's seen Shifu struggling for many, many years. And like a great therapist, he doesn't ever give the answers. He's always gently guiding. And I think this is a moment where we like to think it's very clear that right here Oogway makes the 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. So Oogway knows "It is my time", and Oogway chooses this departure time—look, I'm getting goosebumps—but it's a beautiful, emotional moment. It's a significant moment in the story. And I think again, it was one of those sequences early on that was a real proof of concept for how deep and emotional a movie could be, and how, again, we wanted to make something that was taking the story seriously. And we didn't want to be a parody, we didn't want to be a spoof, we didn't want to be jokey. We wanted to be significant and deep and rich.

OSBORNE
And our actors, Randall Duk Kim and Dustin, we really asked them to dig in for this sequence to make it heartfelt, to make it believable. Dustin had to be anguished and conflicted, and Randall had to be...

STEVENSON
Calm, at peace.

OSBORNE
...Accepting of... for Oogway, this is a new adventure. This is not a bad thing, that he's moving on. There's a more interesting adventure awaiting him on some other plane of existence, so he's okay with it. It's Shifu's who's very, very not okay, with losing his mentor, his master, and his safety net, really, for everything that's about to come.

STEVENSON
And I think also, there's some backstory 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. And it wasn't until he believed he failed, or believed he wasn't good enough, didn't believe in himself—which again, is thematic to the film—that he became a teacher. And he thought "I'm going to raise the next Dragon Warrior, I'm going to create the Dragon Warrior." So Shifu's been on this track of "I failed at my mission", but Oogway's known, "No, no, there is a greater mission for you."

OSBORNE
Which is where Oogway gives him his staff and says...

STEVENSON
"You're now me. You need to take over the role of..."

OSBORNE
Which Shifu doesn't get. Shifu doesn't understand.

STEVENSON
He's using it as a weapon, and he'll actually go on to use the staff in a forceful way that is very strange.

[Scenes changes to the barracks kitchen, where Po is sitting at the table with the Five.]

STEVENSON
And now we come to the sequence we cursed early on in production by naming it "Fun in the Kitchen." This sequence was not fun. And it actually is fun now, in the final movie, I would say.

OSBORNE
But for many years it was the absolute opposite of fun. It was the least funny sequence you've ever seen.

STEVENSON
And we knew the core idea of Shifu, after the death of his master, finding Po, you know, doing something ridiculous, that was the core idea. We always wanted to have Shifu coming from this horrible thing into everybody laughing, the Furious Five with their feet up on the tables, and they're eating, they're breaking their kung fu diet. And we wanted to have that reality come slamming into Po, and it was actually I think Phil Craven who first boarded the idea that Po makes fun of Shifu, and then we kind of expanded on that. So Po starts imitating Shifu, and I think it's brilliantly animated. And it's mocking, but yet Po, if you listen carefully, he's actually 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 is that he's never lashing out at anyone but himself. It's kind of this consistent thing that he does. And because we needed this to be fun, we of course, we have the famous joke "The boob bowls."

OSBORNE
The biggest laugh in the movie usually is...

STEVENSON
Back in the day...

OSBORNE
It used to be this sustained laugh that would just go on and on, much to our surprise.

STEVENSON
And we test screened to kids, and kids went nuts, they laughed for a minute straight. And actually, we should put that soundtrack on the DVD's extra as an Easter egg, because they laughed for a minute straight, it was the craziest thing. They were like climbing over the seats, talking to their friends about it.

OSBORNE
And Jeffrey Katzenberg was at that screening, I remember him turning and looking at us, and we just knew there was no way we were cutting that scene out.

STEVENSON
Yeah, it's there forever.

STEVENSON
This next sequence was really the hardest one to get right. We knew we had this big comedic laugh coming when see Po running away, but the actual 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.

OSBORNE
This scene existed as a card. There was always a scene that we had to have in the film called "Po and Shifu have it out."

STEVENSON
Jed Diffenderfer did the earliest version when it involved a punching bag, and it was more of a training sequence.

OSBORNE
We went through so many versions of trying to get this scene right, and it was the last sequence we put into production, and we knew that because we were having such trouble trying to get the balance right, it would be the last thing that we did. And we recorded it more times than any other scene with Jack and Dustin.

STEVENSON
Jack was always like, "This one again?"

OSBORNE
"Didn't I do this great already?" And he always did. And it was us, we kept monkeying with it and changing the writing, and trying to change the status. Shift is the status transaction between these two characters. Po, who was desperate to stay, who is now 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 there. Getting the actual chemistry and balance right was very, very challenging.

STEVENSON
And also finding this no-man's-land to set this in. It's not the dojo, it's not the palace, it's sort of 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...

OSBORNE
Shifu reveals that he doesn't know how to do it, even though he has committed to believing.

STEVENSON
These two characters need each other to complete their journey. They totally need each other so bad.

OSBORNE
But they don't know how it's going to work at this point. So this is sort of their...

STEVENSON
It's a giving up.

OSBORNE
Their darkest, in a sense, emotionally, this is the darkest point for them.

STEVENSON
And then Tigress will pick up the charge, and I think that is always what we wanted to have. That we saw the fracture earlier in the kitchen when the Furious Five know...

OSBORNE
And she makes the plea to Shifu, "Come on, give me my shot. Let me do it. I'm your best student, we're all trained. You've equipped us to do this." And I think she's completely shaken when he rejects her because of his promise to Oogway.

STEVENSON
So she's defying her master at this point, she's defying Oogway, and she's against everything she's ever learned. I mean, she's the most disciplined, most honorable of all warriors, and also at this moment we get to see how amazing she is. And so we want the audience to believe that, wow, Tigress is going to do it.

OSBORNE
She's going to succeed.

STEVENSON
The Five, they're gonna join up.

OSBORNE
Like a team of superheroes. We want you to think that obviously, this crack elite force going out to take down the bad guy has got a huge chance of success.

[Shifu is seen sitting by the peach tree as dawn approaches]

STEVENSON
This location and moment is affectionately known as "Mopey Mountain" to our crew. Mike Mitchell coined that term because we actually used to have one more instance of Shifu sitting upset and not sure what to do. And we kind of pared it down and went for the simpler, one moment of despair before enlightenment. And that comes in the sound.

OSBORNE
And talking about the sound, yes, Shifu has kung fu hearing, we've established that.

STEVENSON
But he's out of it.

OSBORNE
Theoretically, he should know where the sound is coming from and not go to the kwoon, to see Po's there. He should know where it's coming from, but it actually worked better for him to go to the place he expects it to be, which is the Training Hall. And then to find Po's in the kitchen.

STEVENSON
It's actually very symbolic for Shifu because he's spent his whole life thinking he knows the answer and thinking he knows the right way to do things, so he thinks those sounds should be coming out of the dojo. But really this is the beginning of Shifu starting to look at things in a different way.

OSBORNE
Starting to think outside his box. His box is the Training Hall.

STEVENSON
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 maybe do things in a different way. And this moment right here, when he sees Po in the splits...

OSBORNE
Harking back to that split that Tigress did in combat when Shifu says "It takes years to get that right." Po can get it right when he's not thinking about it, if he's thinking about something else.

STEVENSON
Po had this internal ability, he has this natural ability because of his love for kung fu and his obsession with it, and it only can show itself when he's distracted. And right now we get to see him distracted by food.

STEVENSON
So 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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
This is the birthplace of kung fu.

OSBORNE
It's where Oogway invented it, it's where Oogway probably taught Shifu, and then Shifu went and created the box, the dojo, and started creating a fabricated version of this. So this is a very significant moment for Shifu, to start turning this corner, and becoming more like Oogway, more open to the possibilities of the universe. And then we get to see Oogway actually doing kung fu, which is super cool.

STEVENSON
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. And also for Shifu's symbolic rebirth and his declaration that he is Po's master, that he is invested and invigorated, and committed to making Po a success, on the same place where Oogway created kung fu.

OSBORNE
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..."

STEVENSON
No, we needed to compress time.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
We don't know exactly how long it takes, it doesn't really matter-

OSBORNE
Don't do the math, people-

STEVENSON
It doesn't really make sense. It's just the idea they went away, and they took as long as it took for Po to get where he needed to go.

OSBORNE
We're coming to the chopstick fight which is, hands down, the audience favorite 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.

STEVENSON
It was a James Bond meets the supervillain thing. They were being polite to each other as they talked about their back-story, but trying to dominate each other as they tried to steal food out of each other's chopsticks.

OSBORNE
Then when we realized 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...

STEVENSON
How very apt.

OSBORNE
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, and one of the things he pointed out was he didn't realize 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.

STEVENSON
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 color. So, the mix of those color elements became a significant thing in the visual design of that sequence.

OSBORNE
And now we're coming up to one of the biggest set pieces in our film, one of the coolest, most ambitious...

STEVENSON
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...

OSBORNE
Jed came up with that image.

STEVENSON
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 dyanmics of figuring out the rope bridge moving constantly...

OSBORNE
The breaking of the boards.

STEVENSON
Characters adjusting their weight on the bridge as it's moving.

OSBORNE
The mist is also super-complicated.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
Nobody's ever done it before.

STEVENSON
It's obviously really hard.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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 plowing through the mist. Tai 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 colors, we've kept his eyes golden, our hero color. 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

OSBORNE
We wanted to play the drama of they've all been paralyzed and defeated by Tai Lung, but we wanted the comedy as well of the fact that these guys are now incapcitated. 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.

STEVENSON
So, we go into a very, very difficult and lengthy scene that was very hard to get right.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
Po thinks he's going to be transformed. Shifu is taking steps towards becoming more like Oogway.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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 fulfill 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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
The secret to limitless power.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
"The greatest power in the universe is within."

OSBORNE
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 philisophical 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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
And then we go into the big transition into our exodus.

STEVENSON
Brilliantly done by Yong Duk, this use of succession of cuts through the long lens.

OSBORNE
'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.

STEVENSON
There's definitely an imperative to get out before the bogeyman returns.

OSBORNE
Most of the energy comes from camera and choreography.

STEVENSON
The jittery handheld camera. Especially in contrast to how stately the previous sequence has been. It really worked well.

OSBORNE
That's the Shaw brothers there, two other members of Tenacious D - they're stealing a foo dog.

STEVENSON
Our favorite dumb joke in the movie.

OSBORNE
Nobody sees it and it goes by quickly.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
They're morons.

STEVENSON
That's one of our way-homers, but it always made us happy.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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 not to continuously play the dad for comedy, but to let there be a significant relationship here that doesn't always get talked about.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
He's trying to heal his son by giving him...

STEVENSON
The only thing he's got left.

OSBORNE
...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.

STEVENSON
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 favorite 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...

OSBORNE
We skip right past it.

STEVENSON
...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 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 appearence there.

OSBORNE
We wanted to create tension in this moment. This very still, static camera face-off moment.

STEVENSON
With the electricity in the air of the building storm before the storm breaks.

OSBORNE
With these two guys, everything is subtext in this conversation.

STEVENSON
Twenty years of everything, actually. There's not just a lot of hatred there, there's also love and regret.

OSBORNE
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 much 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 realizes 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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
Yeah, they sort of become Greek gods at that point. Shifu and Tai Lung fighting in the sky.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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 Tai 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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
He's using his weaknesses against him. He knows Tai Lung wants the scroll.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
We spent a lot of time wondering what the shape of this final 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 realized 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.

OSBORNE
And we're coming up on the most dramatic... Tai 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.

STEVENSON
A circular crater, using our circular language again.

OSBORNE
And now 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...

STEVENSON
The legendary battle.

OSBORNE
...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...

STEVENSON
A shot at redemption if Tai Lung had listened to Po's wisdom, he might not get Wuxied into oblivion at the end.

OSBORNE
This is also the moment when the playing field has been leveled. 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.

STEVENSON
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 Tai 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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
At one point 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.

STEVENSON
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 atomized, or what actually happened to him.

OSBORNE
Now we're coming up on my most favorite 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 like he's dying, but we get this great reversal and it's such a joy that he's still alive!

STEVENSON
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."

OSBORNE
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!"

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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 all the characters a curtain call in this great graphic environment.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
Flex that old 2-D muscle that's been a little bit underused recently.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
We also wanted to honor everybody who worked so hard on this movie, 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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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 humor than we've seen in the film. All these little moments indicate the world has changed for the better.

OSBORNE
It continues the way it always was. Because that is what is so nice about Po's story, 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.

STEVENSON
He is the Dragon Warrior but working at his father's restaurant, serving noodles when he's not saving the world.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
Po showing the scroll. If you look close, there's a shot of Po showing the children of the village, these little rabbits, the blank scroll, so they can see their reflection.

OSBORNE
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 Tai Lung see it.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
They're like the Marines. First in, last out.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
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 colide 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.

OSBORNE
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.

STEVENSON
I love this little moment where Po has got an action figure of himself.

OSBORNE
He's now carved his own action figure.

STEVENSON
He's now, he really is the theme of the movie, which is, he is his own hero.

OSBORNE
He's his own fan boy.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
Beautifully animated by Ben Willis.

STEVENSON
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.

OSBORNE
Mark Osborne, the other director, we say thank you.

STEVENSON
Be your own hero.

OSBORNE
Yes. And always, always, look within for the answer.

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