“I’m not a big fat panda, I’m the big fat panda”: comic, material, and digital bodies in Kung Fu Panda’s animated action spectacle

Kung Fu Panda is a film about the body. This is so on the level of its narrative about a chubby panda who masters the intensely athletic art of kung fu and also its existence as 3-D digital animation in the post-Disney, post-Pixar ‘realist’ tradition, which, however fantastical the content, seeks to construct a world and characters subject to a coherent physics. Furthermore, the world Kung Fu Panda (re-)constructs is the carnivalesque universe of the kung fu comedy pioneered by Jackie Chan. Kung fu has itself been seen as a ‘body genre’, relying for its effects on the performing bodies of its stars and stuntworkers and addressing its audience through the ensuing sensations in their own bodies, rather than on a ‘cognitive’ level (Hunt 2003, pp. 2–3).
As Chung (2012) has argued, Kung Fu Panda displaces such ‘real’ bodies from their central place in the genre, making digital technology the ‘star’ instead. But this only serves to entangle us with a new range of bodies: animal and human, real and virtual, visibly present and invisibly haunting – the bodies of the characters, of the past kung fu stars they reference, and the film’s voice actors and animators, among others. Drawing on Chung’s insights, my own analysis concentrates on the film’s action choreography and the fantasies of the body this mobilises.

In Kung Fu Panda, the radicalism of Hong Kong action cinema’s cheaply made ‘Third-Worldist’ approach, reliant on the body as means of spectacle rather than Hollywood’s intensely capitalised, technologically advanced output, is reversed. Po’s excess corporeality is affirmed through both plot and animation technique: his pendulous arms and rubbery belly mark him as subject to gravity and inertia in a way none of the other characters are, and it is precisely his use rather than transcendence of his body’s subjection to the laws of physics that allows Po to triumph at the film’s climax. However, our viewing pleasure is no longer a matter of the capabilities of a human body (potentially ours, too) to conjure the marvellous. Rather, the marvel is the power of technology (and the networks of capital and labour mobilised in it) to reproduce the same effect, and the pleasure is recognising ourselves as the consuming subject for whom this mechanism is set in motion.

But Kung Fu Panda’s translation of a range of cinematic techniques (wirework, trampolines, constructive editing, manipulation of camera speed, etc.) drawn from kung fu cinema should also make us wary of imagining live-action martial arts cinema as a site of unmediated authenticity: the performing kung fu body has always been ‘animated’ by ever-changing cinematic technologies. Jackie Chan has discussed the influence of silent-era physical comedians such as Keaton and Chaplin, but his performance style owes a broader debt to the anarchic, utopian exploding of everyday reality that Walter Benjamin saw them sharing with early Mickey Mouse cartoons (Leslie, 2004). To what extent, then, should we see Kung Fu Panda as exemplifying such a ‘cartoonalism’ (Summers, 2020) and to what extent does it belong more squarely within the ‘realism’ Disney made dominant in the 1930s?