功夫熊猫:盖世五侠的秘密 Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five review by Rafe Telsch

If you thought Po the panda’s adventures ended with Kung Fu Panda you were wrong. Now a full kung fu master, Po has to face even bigger challenges - like training a group of youngling bunnies and dealing with a mediocre direct to DVD continuation of his story.

Secrets of the Furious Five finds us rejoining Po after his battle with Tai Long. Here he’s put in charge of training a new class of kung fu students, made up of the bunnies who were so cute in the first movie. Seeing the students bent on learning how to fight, Po instead teaches them about the character traits that are so important in kung fu - confidence, patience, courage, and more.

Each of these lessons comes from telling the students about the early days of the famed “furious five” (I guess they didn’t get a title change after Po became the Dragon Warrior, eh?). It turns out that Tigress, Mantis, Crane, Viper, and M weren’t such perfect kung fu masters all along, and they’ve had to learn important lessons and overcome their own shortcomings.

Clocking in at only 24 minutes, Secrets of the Furious Five really shouldn’t be on its own DVD. Really this is just a short extension of the original movie, much like we’ve been seeing from Pixar on their DVD releases for a while now. Packaging it separately makes it look like more than it is, but this really is just more of a bonus feature than a separate product, which is probably why it’s being released the way it is (see below for more grumbling about that).

My biggest complaint about Secrets is the reduced quality level. The opening of the movie is rendered with the same quality and impressive detail as the original movie, but as Po shares the stories of the Furious Five, the animation changes into a flat, 2D animation style, similar to what was used for Po’s dream at the beginning of the original movie. Since most of the movie is done in that flat animation style, this isn’t anywhere near as impressive as Kung Fu Panda.

Along with the reduced quality in the animation, the vocal talent is also reduced for Secrets. Half the original cast, including Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, and Seth Rogen, don’t return for this short sequel, resulting in a disappointing separation from the original film. Of course, the story does attempt to make up for these vocal differences by giving us younger versions of some of the characters, but it’s still disappointing.

Ultimately, Secrets of the Furious Five comes down to its story, which is made up of five different shorts that share the idea that Po wasn’t so different from the Furious Five in the first place. Each of the warriors had something they had to overcome, or some lesson to learn on their way to becoming a master. Of course, taking that into consideration, you’d think they’d be more understanding of the Panda when he was first getting his kung fu chops, but I don’t think we’re supposed to think about that.

Instead, Secrets of the Furious Five offers a more clear cut moral of what we were supposed to learn from Kung Fu Panda. Kung fu isn’t just about fighting; it’s about responsibility, and building character. I like the message here, I just wish it was presented in a more attractive package, especially when compared to the movie this short comes from, and ultimately just capitalizes on without really adding anything new to Po’s story.

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