Kung Fu Panda (2008) Behind the Scenes Featurette

Behind the Scenes Featurette from the movie Kung Fu Panda (2008).

Kung Fu Panda is a 2008 American animated martial arts comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The first installment in the Kung Fu Panda franchise, it was directed by John Stevenson and Mark Osborne in their feature directorial debuts, and written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger from a story by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris. The film stars the voices of Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Randall Duk Kim, James Hong, Dan Fogler, Michael Clarke Duncan and Jackie Chan. The film, set in a version of ancient China populated by anthropomorphic animals, centres on a bumbling panda named Po (Black), a kung-fu enthusiast. When a notorious snow leopard named Tai Lung (McShane) is foretold to escape at Chorh-Gom Prison, Po is unwittingly named the "Dragon Warrior", a prophesied hero worthy of reading a scroll that has been intended to grant its reader limitless power.

The film's publicized work began in October 2004 and was conceived by Michael Lachance, a DreamWorks Animation executive, originally as a parody of martial arts films. However, director Stevenson decided to instead make an action-comedy wuxia film that incorporates the hero's journey narrative archetype for the lead character. The main characters' animation was more complex than anything DreamWorks had done before. The project was officially announced in September 2005. Like most DreamWorks Animation films, the score for Kung Fu Panda was composed by Hans Zimmer, this time collaborating with John Powell; the former visited China to absorb the culture and used the China National Symphony Orchestra as part of the scoring process.

Kung Fu Panda premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival on May 15, 2008, and was theatrically released in the United States on June 6. It grossed $631.7 million on a budget of $130 million, making it the third highest-grossing film of 2008 and the highest-grossing animated film of the year worldwide, in addition to having the fourth-largest opening weekend for a DreamWorks film at the American and Canadian box office, behind the Shrek franchise. It received positive reviews from critics, and was nominated for an Academy Award, as well as a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Film, but lost both awards to WALL-E. The film's success spawned a multimedia franchise, which comprises the sequels Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011), Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) and Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024).