Kung-Fu Panda 3

Po has to save the day from yet another threat emerging from the past, but he'll need to master using chi to do it. That requires understanding who he is, something that maybe his birth father could help him with, since Po hasn't had any chance to learn what being a panda is about.

I can't help feeling bad for Po. All these enemies he's had to deal with were someone else's problem originally, and they've passed the buck down the line to him. When Oogway loses to Kai at the start of the film (enabling Kai to escape the Spirit Realm), he says it was never his destiny to defeat Kai, that he passed that to another. Meaning Po.

The idea comes up a few times that no one remembers Kai. It's been 500 years, and even though he was once the great Master Oogway's best friend, he's barely a footnote. And that frustrates him, pisses him off. I wondered about him as a forgotten piece of the past, showing up while Po tries to connect with a part of himself he'd thought lost forever. Po tries to learn new thing, grow and adapt, but Kai sticks to the same things he was doing when Oogway originally defeated him.

Although they kind of covered that ground in the last film, with Po and Shen each trying to deal with traumas of their past. Shen was focused on settling scores and was destroyed, Po ultimately accepted what he learned and moved forward.

Still, Po wound up with two dads, which was sweet. The whole subplot where Mr. Ping fears he'll be shoved aside now that the birth father has miraculously shown up was handled well. Li isn't portrayed as some bad guy out to split Po and Mr. Ping apart, he simply wants to reconnect with the son he thought was gone. And eventually the two dads come to an understanding over that.

It was probably the ads I saw in the lead-up to the release of the film, but I expected Mei-Mei to play a larger role in the film. But she shows up partway in, flirts with and confuses Po immediately, and nothing is really developed beyond that. I'm not asking for a full-on romance subplot, but I thought she would get a little more focus. She got about as much as the toddler panda that wouldn't stop following Tigress around.

Which is one of the things I noticed watching, there were certain parts that felt half-formed. The bit I mentioned with Mei-Mei, and there was a scene with Crane and Mantis I thought was going to build to something. I guess it was more about Kai's increasing threat, but it's been rare in these movies that the Furious Five get much screen time when Po isn't around to hog the character development, so I thought it might mean something. The movie is only 90 minutes, so it isn't as though it was overly stuffed.