My friend, the panda will never fulfill his destiny, nor you yours, until you let go of the illusion of control. The panda? Master, that panda is not the Dragon Warrior. if you do not believe that the Dragon Warrior can stop him. Tai Lung has broken out of prison! He's on his way! One simplistic conclusion can be that we can control a few things here and a few things there, which gives us a sense(or illusion) of control but in the grand scheme of things we ain’t got the control.Īnother, a little more complicated, and perhaps a little more accurate, conclusion is that control is an elusive thing like sand slipping through our fingers when we think it is secure inside our fist that we do not know all that much about control, how much or how little we have it.I. Of course, both are right in their own way and their opinions don’t really contradict each others’. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach. But no matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree.
SHIFU: And I can control-(Shifu punches the ground, creating a hole and places the seed in it.) -where to plant the seed. Irritated by that, Shifu angrily tosses the peach in the air, leaps up, and splits it with a chop and again continues. In the end, in the complete reversal of roles, Shifu lets go his sense of control and Po takes over the reins.Ī peach falls on his head (See, how the film seems to amalgamate sincerity with humor!) and Oogway chuckles. This see-saw of control is seen numerous times throughout the movie. That is where we see for the first time, Po trying to take control of the situation and Shifu failing in that. Not because he is motivated but because he is a Kung Fu fanboy. However, when Shifu shows him how hard Kung Fu training can be-with the intention of making him quit-he does not quit. He obviously does not know any Kung Fu, and also does not have any idea how he will learn. Po, on the other hand, has no idea what he is going to do. He is so confident in his sense of control that he promises his other students that he would make Po quit. Shifu does not believe that Po is actually a Kung Fu fighter-neither does Po for that matter-and tries to make him quit. Things change when their paths cross when Shifu has to train Po into a Kung Fu warrior, a dragon warrior to be precise. As the story progresses, we often see this lack-of-control/full-of-control dichotomy very often: when Po tries to enter the gates of Jade Palace, when Shifu extinguishes the thousands of candles in a blink of an eye. It is also the key philosophy of the movie, but we shall come to that later. He is in total control.Ĭontrol, or rather the sense (or illusion) of control, is the motif that binds Po and Shifu’s stories together. As one can see in the scene where Shifu is first introduced, his students try to win against him but he is fast and accurate, predicting each of his students’ moves and countering them. Shifu, on the other hand, is the great Kung Fu master, someone in total control of everything around him. In other words, he lacks the necessary control. He knows everything there is to know about Kung Fu (not the art but the story) but has no plan for his own life. He dreams of becoming a great warrior but makes no effort for it.
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While it is true that Kung Fu Panda is primarily about Po (the Kung Fu Panda), the movie can also be read as the anti-parallel stories of Po and his master Shifu, two arcs running against each other.Īt the beginning of the movie Po is the clumsy oversized (compared to other animals in the movie) panda, who is living his life partly in a dream-of becoming a great Kung Fu warrior-and partly in a surrendered reality. Take away the farce for a while, and one might see what a great movie it is.
But hidden beneath all that pretense, all those jokes, is a sincere story with a deep philosophical undertone.