Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting...

Just got round to watching Kung-Fu Panda with the kids. They've seen it a bunch of times but I haven't had a chance to spend any quality sofa-time with them recently. I feared it was going to be one of those films that are more fun for tinies than grown-ups and that I'd have to just grin and (panda) bear it, but it was actually pretty good. The excellent animation (which was, satisfyingly, not only as fast as lightning but also a little bit frightening) and a good few laughs more than make up for the schmaltzy "message" and unlikely ending. (Is it odd of me to complain about unlikeliness in a film about a talking panda who learns kung-fu? Even the most extreme fantasy needs to* have some kind of internal logic, I think.) The only thing I didn't understand was why it had to have such a star-studded cast. OK, Jack Black was terrific and the part was obviously written with him in mind, but Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu and Jackie Chan added nothing to the film except increased publicity, and I can't really see the poi-

Oh, right. OK, I get it.



*I'm very, very excited that I just mistyped "to" as "typo"!!! What are the chances of that? (Probably fairly high actually, given that "y" is next to "t", "p" next to "o", and that my typing could only be less accurate if I tried it wearing boxing gloves...)