Kids get everything

So, thought it'd been too long since I did a review, but the problem is, I haven't seen anything in a while that made me want to review it at full length. So I thought I'd just mention two movies I'd seen relatively recently, Kung Fu Panda and Coraline. Maybe the kids'll turn out okay, after all.

Yes, I know KFP came out a while ago, but I'd been putting off seeing it. Frankly, the ads drove me away (Good God Effy but they do that a lot); why must they show the most dimwitted and irritating gags in the entire movie? Are they attempting to attract the Head Injury Ward set, or something?

But anyway, I thought I'd start with Coraline, since it's less deep. Yeah, I know that sounds nuts, but keep yer britches on and you'll see what I mean. Anyway, I can't think of a single thing I didn't like about Coraline, which is not something I can say all that often (Dirty Harry, the original, is another film I saw recently of which I can say that).

Great voices, great animation (shocking insight, that)--wasn't the cat Goliath in Disney's Gargoyles, and the narrator for a bunch of Navy ads? I also liked that the moral of the story was more subtle than "good vs. evil" or "reality is preferable to fantasy." See, this was actually, "never sacrifice the goods you've been given for the ones you think you want." It's not about gratitude, precisely; it's about humility, and understanding that everything good is a gift, including existence. That idea, not coincidentally, is at the heart of nearly every fairy tale--it's what good ol' GKC called "the ethics of elfland," in a chapter of Orthodoxy (wonder if Gaiman's read that). It's the fundamental ethic of Paganism at its deepest--certainly a step up from the airy-fairy po-mo nonsense that passes for most imaginative fair.

Now, Kung Fu Panda actually gave me a few complaints. I wish Jackie Chan's monkey had gotten to talk more. All that talk of "belief" was irritatingly Kierkegaardian. I don't think the villain should've been a snow leopard (I like snow leopards, sue me), and I wouldn't've made the Tiger a girl--I like catgirls as much as the next guy (probably significantly moreso, actually), but Tigers are purely Yang animals. You want a Kung Fu chick, make her Leopard (they're more Yin than Tigers are, though I don't remember that they're actually Yin).

But otherwise...A-frigging-mazing. The choreography was good, both for the gags and for the serious fights; the slapstick was vintage Jackie Chan (I wonder if he helped them choreograph it). A lot of the gags are funnier if you've seen many wuxia films; the whole thing shows a familiarity with the genre that's impressive by my standards.

Here on out, it's SPOILER COUNTRY (text purpled out).

More importantly, the turtle...is a Taoist. The stuff he says, that sounds sorta profound, but might just mean he keeps a bong in his shell? Taoism. It's reminiscent of, "And the master said, 'What if my buttocks turned into cart wheels, and I rolled down this hill?' And the pupils were enlightened." He grows peach trees, for Heaven's sake (small joke). And then when he died, he became a frigging immortal!

It don't stop there, though, kids. The whole movie's an allegory of the Zen teaching of the Everyday Mind! What's the secret technique? What's the secret ingredient?

Mu.

What's the mind of a master? Why, your everyday mind.

I didn't know Yagyu Munenori had registered any screenplays with the Writer's Guild, did you?