Yes I saw Kung Fu Panda the other day. And yes, I liked the movie. The animation was fantastic all throughout, the musical score was - for a kids’ movie - really cool, and really, with a cast like that, you can’t go wrong with the voice acting. Dustin Hoffman and Jack Black outdid themselves in this film, and you could tell that the effort that went into acting out even the smallest of roles was gargantuan, to say the least.

But the problem was that there were too many small roles, considering that it was a small cast, to begin with.

Okay, I can understand that the show was meant for kids, but you topbilled the main character with a cast of characters voiced by illustruous actors like Jacky Chan and Seth Rogen; it only follows logically that you USE these actors effectively, right?

Unfortunately, though, this is hardly the case with Kung Fu Panda. Angelina Jolie and Lucy Liu hardly get enough character development as Tigress and Viper, but what really got my goat was that Jacky Chan, as Monkey, hardly got twenty lines into the film. I would never have known that he was the voice actor behind the monkey if I hadn’t stayed for the credits. That’s how much of a wallflower the rest of the cast was, when compared to Po, Shifu and Tai Lung.

Don’t get me wrong: the movie was really, really good, and you’d have to be a cynic not to enjoy it even one bit, but it seemed like a waste of talent to get all of these big names just to act as wallflowers in a film that’s just bursting with untold potential.

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