Kung Fu Panda
During the Pokémon craze about ten years ago I heard somebody say, “Its not even the violence so much, Pokémon is just dumb. And sometimes that’s worse.” I found myself revisiting that idea when I saw Kung Fu Panda last week. Bearing in mind that criticism of children’s media usually gets a response of “its just kid stuff, get over it” to “this material is harmful to children,” I’d like to state that I usually fall in the first camp. Kids usually only remember the stuff that they want, and it usually involves people getting hit in the nuts. If you ask a child what the moral of a story is after he or she watches it and their explanation will probably have more to do with a funny moment, or action sequence, from the movie.
None of this obscures the fact that children’s movie are full of–however ineffective–ideology. Large chunks of the culture war revolve around media as a political and ideological tool for indoctrination, and a lot of attention and discussion is given to movies (The Dark Knight is a perfect example). I’d like two suggest two points in Kung Fu Panda worthy of attention. The first is that the movie props reinforces the rare postmodern mix of nihilism and romanticism and presents it a cultural necessity. This is represented by the combination of unquestioning faith in one’s “master” even in the event of all evidence pointing to the contrary, and that the dragon scroll–while empty–still held immense cultural significance. I don’t feel that the meanings behind these points require much in the way of elucidation.
The second problem I had with the content of the movie isn’t really a problem with Kung Fu Panda at all, its much wider spread. I first noticed it in the TV show’s Friends and Sex and the City (both of which I enjoyed, in spite of their objectionable content). In both shows the protagonists–all white and middle-class–have both fabulous lives and oodles of free time. They live in spacious apartments packed full of well decorated expensive decorations. They have tons of disposable income on top of all of this. This was less evident in Kung Fu Panda, but it was still there. A small boorish main character find himself living in a palace full of antiques and eccentric co-stars. I wonder, if nothing else, whether this is more harmful than anything else in the film moving picture world.
