A cuddly comedy for entire family

Jack Black's porky kung-fu panda has some entertaining moves - but he needs help with the wisecracks, says Peter Bradshaw. Some years ago, the movie writer and award-winning children's novelist SF Said was telling me about a stalled proposal to make a screen version of his book Varjak Paw, all about a kitten who survives on the mean city streets by using an occult form of feline martial arts.

These plans were evidently held up because of another project doing the rounds in Hollywood.

Something about a panda that could do kung fu. We agreed that this other idea was obviously nonsensical, spurious and irritatingly obstructive.

Be that as it may, here it is: the new animated family comedy for the summer from DreamWorks, lavishly premiered at this year's Cannes film festival, with Jack Black clowning on the red carpet, obligingly inflating his bearded features into an ursine scowl and throwing some moves in the vicinity of somebody in a big hot panda suit.

Amiable and entertaining as the film is, there are few adult-orientated wisecracks of the sort that we've come to hope for from this kind of movie, and it does appear to be targeted at a very young audience.

For a combat comedy, it's gentle stuff.

And with its subdued, cod-Oriental landscapes, it represents an almost homeopathically diluted and naturalised form of the Chinese martial arts fashion that was revived in Hollywood with the arrival of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000.

Black supplies the voice of Po, a fat and lazy panda who dreams of being a martial arts ninja, transcending his personal slovenliness and becoming a lean, mean fighting machine.

He dreams of glorious triumphs, in which onlookers were "blinded due to overexposure to pure awesomeness" but to whom he nevertheless extended the generous assurance: "There is no charge for awesomeness or attractiveness."

The dull reality is that he is stuck serving noodles in his dad's restaurant, and his dad for some reason appears to be a large emaciated bird, very similar to Big Bird in Sesame Street.

Po is so alienated from the retail noodle business that he wonderingly remarks that he doesn't feel like he's his father's son at all - but this is as observant and self-questioning as Po gets.

Meanwhile, up in the secluded temple in the misty, cloudy heights of the mountain, an ascetic community of fighting animals prepare for the final reckoning.

They are led by Master Shifu, voiced by Dustin Hoffman and his legendary followers: Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Crane (David Cross), Mantis (Seth Rogen) and Viper, played by Lucy Liu - and for all I know this final character's name may be inspired by the slightly more adult Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, in Tarantino's Kill Bill, in which Liu played a fanatical killer called O-Ren Ishii.

These fighters are perpetually snapping alertly into combat formation, but have very little in the way of actual enemy danger.

This is all to change. The warriors are informed that that their deadliest enemy, the snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane), may be about to break free from his prison fortress and wreak a terrible havoc on their gentle valley, but instead of fighting him themselves, the five must exercise heroic levels of restraint and Zen acceptance and await an ultimate kung fu master to save them.

And, of course, the inscrutable workings of fate decree that this master is the wheezingly unfit and dorkish Po, who can never climb the stone steps up to the Temple without having to pause at the top, bent over holding his knees, breathing heavily and being obviously on the verge of throwing up.

This quintet have to swallow their pride and bite their various shapes and sizes of tongue at Po's obvious unfitness for the task ahead. For his part, Po is struck almost dumb at meeting his legendary heroes in the flesh: "Wow, you guys are so much bigger than your action figures, except for you, Mantis, you're about the same size."

Later, Shifu intuits a way of instructing the unpromising Po in martial arts and wordlessly leads him away to a yet more misty and secluded part of the mountain: "I know you're tryna be all mystical and kung fu-ey," whinges Po as he trudges along the winding path, "but couldja tell me where we're going?"

There are some laughs and fun, and this is a solid bet for the summer holidays, though it's a curious experience to sit down to a movie, expecting it to be a sophisticated product like the first two Shreks, Finding Nemo or The Incredibles, and find that it is actually aimed at a much younger demographic.

The screenplay, by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, does have the feel of a script that has been, if not dumbed down exactly, carefully filleted for material that cannot be readily and easily understood by children.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it's as well to understand things from the outset: it is best appreciated by families and a pre-tween audience.

This Panda delivers a cuddle more than a thump.