Still, the film doesn't hit its stride until Po goes one on one with Master Shifu (Hoffman), a red panda who is as fleet and sharp as Po is roly-poly and fuzzy. Shifu is a virtuoso combination of voice and image. Playing an authoritative teacher forces Hoffman to focus his overflowing energy; it must have been revitalizing for him to play this terse, tense character. The imaginative casting brings out Hoffman's two most appealing qualities - warm, edgy humor and benign aggression. Black's casting, by contrast, is too perfect. In that opening five minutes, he empties his bag of vocal tricks; from then on, the combination of Po's round, jovial image and Black's pushy tone becomes affable overkill.
Only when Po is with Shifu does everything work. In one of the film's finer touches, Shifu registers as more of a father figure to Po than his real dad, Mr. Ping. Shifu, after all, is a red panda. Mr. Ping is a goose.
When Po connects to Shifu, even the action grows more sensible and scintillating. Shifu recognizes that he must reach Po's fighting heart through his jiggling belly; dumplings become as crucial as clubs. The combat develops an exhilaratingly improvisational feeling and the filmmakers sustain it to the end.
Elsewhere, Shifu's own master, a wise old tortoise named Master Oogway, wins all the memorable lines and summons the most humor and affection. Randall Duk Kim conjures the perfect gnomic aura for such fortune-cookie statements as "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift - that is why it is the present."
Kung Fu Panda is a gift, too, albeit a modest one. In a good way, this chop-socky cartoon reminded me of the old joke about chop suey joints: An hour after you see this film, you're hungry to see another one. You may not want to see it twice, but it does whet your appetite for movies.
michael.sragow@baltsun.com
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Kung Fu Panda
(Paramount/Dreamworks) With the voices of Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman. Directed by Mark Osborne and John Stevenson. Rated PG for sequences of martial-arts action. Time 88 minutes.
