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Cannes Festivals

Cannes 2008 Reactions: Kung Fu Panda

Last night saw the out of competition premiere of Kung Fu Panda – the latest animated film from DreamWorks Animation.

After Jack Black posed yesterday for photographers alongside a bunch of pandas and inadvertantly confirmed that co-star Angelina Jolie was pregnant with twins, people finally got a look at the film.

Here is a summary of the critical reaction.

James Rocchi of Cinematical is impressed:

Dreamworks Animation’s latest effort may stick out a little on the Red Carpet at Cannes — where it’s screening out of competition — but it’s certainly a well-made kid’s film that earns high points for how directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne clearly crafted and contemplated its look and feel with ambition and style.

Richard Corliss of Time is also taken with the cartoon panda:

Today DreamWorks unveiled its latest ani-movie, Kung Fu Panda. As cunning visual art and ultra-satisfying entertainment, it proved an excellent choice.

…some sequences [are] so smartly thought out and spectacularly executed that they might have been designed by an ace stunt coordinator like Yuen Wo-ping.

Todd McCarthy of Variety is more circumspect:

How many underdog kidpic characters have been told “You just need to believe” in recent years? Whatever the ample number, add one more to the list with “Kung Fu Panda,” a nice looking but heavily formulaic DreamWorks animation entry.

It looks like this is going to do solid business when it opens in the US on June 6th and the UK on July 4th.

Here is the moment where Jack Black accidentally let slip Jolie was pregnant with twins whilst in an interview with Natalie Morales of the Today show:

> Kung Fu Panda at the IMDb
> Official site for Kung Fu Panda