Kung Fu Panda
Films that shaped it
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We loved the martial arts genre. We watched so many of those movies, classic Shaw Brothers films, Kurosawa's films like Yojimbo and Seven Samurai, and the more recent films like Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou's Hero. We wanted to pay homage to those films, not parody them. The challenge was to integrate that reverence for the genre into a DreamWorks comedy.
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We looked at a lot of martial arts films, both classic and modern. We looked at everything from the Shaw Brothers films to Kurosawa’s films, like Seven Samurai and Ran, for their sense of epic scale and character. We also looked at more recent films like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers for their choreography and visual poetry. We wanted to combine the grandeur of those films with the fun of our own story.