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What's up my story-loving nerds! Today's analysis will be on everyone's favorite Kung Fu Panda, Po. We will follow his arc through the second e of the trilogy. My reasons for this are as follows:
The storyline in the second movie is a bit more complex and layered than the first
I like the second movie the best
So please sit back, relax, and join me as we break down the growth of the Dragon Warrior. Oh, and SPOILER ALERT! Also,
The movie opens with a beautiful sequence in the style of a Chinese puppet show. It tells us the story of how the movie's antagonist, Shen, ordered the genocide of all pandas in order to ensure no one could defeat him. He returns home believing that he has successfully handled his little "warrior of black and white" problem. His parents banish him and he swears to return and rule all of China. Typical villain stuff. Now we as the audience know the external stakes and the main focus of Po's internal conflict right from the start. Very convenient.
We then shift to Po who is goofing around with the Furious Five. In the first movie, we watched everyone, including Po, struggle to accept him as the Dragon Warrior. Now, it is clear that everyone has accepted him for who he is and respects him. It's a wholesome opening. Anyway, after playing a bit of chubby bunny with dumplings, Po is called to train with Master Shifu. Here is where we learn about the theme of the movie: Inner Peace.
Shifu explains that in order to obtain inner peace, one must great pain and suffering. This is a very obvious foreshadowing of what is to come for our main character. Before he can begin his training, Po is called away to handle some bandits with his team. At first, they are kicking and putting the bandits in their place. Things go wrong when Po sees the symbol on the leader's arm which triggers a memory from when Po was a baby.
This moment sends him down a path of discovery. He had just begun to feel like he belonged and that he knew himself but starts to question who he is and where We follow the team's move to confront Shen with Po at the head of it. When they first meet, Po has no idea what is going on, but he knows that Shen has the answers he seeks and is determined to get them from him. But Tigress is having none of it. She sees that whatever information Po wants is clouding his judgment and for fear of losing him, she benches him. This is significant because to Po (and everyone else it seems), Tigress is the most "hardcore of them all. she is level-headed, powerful, and never lets her emotions get to her...until now. She even displays it with a hug which shocks everyone. It's a big moment for their friendship. Despite this, Po pushes on and almost gets killed by one of the weapons.
When he awakes, injured and without his team, the soothsayer has brought him to an abandoned village that he's never been to before. At least that's what he thinks at first. As he wanders around, memories of Shen's attack come back to him in brief flashes. Wanting the full picture, Po performs the inner peace technique that he witnessed Shifu do at the beginning of the movie. This forced him to slow down and clear his mind, thus unlocking the exact information he had been trying to get from Shen. Though it was almost more painful. But rather than sink into despair over his, he takes the soothsayer's advice, focusing instead on the now. And right now, he needs to go save his friends.
So in the most Po way possible, he reveals that he is still alive to the advancing fleet of Shen's forces. He frees the Five, welcomes the help of Shifu and the other Kung Fu masters, and seems to have the advantage. Until Shen once again uses the weapon. His allies injured and the fleet now in open water, Po is left to face down Shen and his weapons alone.
Kung Fu Panda against the kung fu ending weapon. Who will win?
Using the inner peace technique, Po manages to deflect the first cannonball. Then another. And another. Eventually, he starts showing off (as he tends to do), throwing the projectiles back at the weapons and destroying them. In his final confrontation, Po voices the lesson he's spent the entire movie learning from his enemy, and Shen's choice to continue on his destructive path gave the characters a brief FOIL moment. Shen had everything while (compared to and thanks to Shen) Po had nothing, yet the panda still chose peace and acceptance as his path.
The thing that the Kung Fu Panda movies do well is that they are able to show the growth in Po without making him seem like this perfect and wise character at the end. They allow him to learn these life-changing lessons while letting him remain the goofy panda that is still likely to make mistakes. If you can get past the anthropomorphic animals fighting to save China using kung fu, it's a very realistic story. As tory of the search for one's self. Who can't relate to that?