Kung Fu Panda is about realizing your True Power of Selfhood Inside You All Along

GAH FUCKING KUNG FU PANDA DON’T GET ME STARTED ON KUNG FU PANDA

…but I suppose you already have.

Right up until the very end, Kung Fu Panda has a really good instantiation of the classic Hero’s Journey arc that I’ve been talking about.  Po is a figure who should be very resonant for a large part of the film’s audience.  He idolizes his warrior heroes and knows a lot about them in an obsessive fannish sort of way, but he is hilariously, almost uniquely unqualified to be a warrior hero himself – due to his lack of physical acumen and his lack of disciplined focus. 

Then, via serendipity, he gets his chance to try and become the kind of hero that he’s always dreamed of being.  And training is a terrible slog that doesn’t work very well, because, again, Po doesn’t have the necessary talents or temperament.  But eventually he and his teacher figure out that they can capitalize on his personal peculiarities to turn him into a weird, unconventional, but effective sort of warrior.  He has a second training montage and this time it sticks.

So far this is great stuff, in mythic terms and didactic terms.  Po has to learn the usual basic Karate Kid suite of lessons: you have to work hard to achieve results, you have to care more about actually getting better than you do about your own ego.  Po and Shifu additionally have to learn a further lesson, one with tremendous widespread resonance in our culture: you won’t get very far trying to ape people who aren’t like you, you need to figure out what you’re actually good at and make the most of the particular talents that you have.  (A controversial moral in some ways and not always a good one, but it’s a coherent moral conveyed well, up to this point.)

All this is symbolically underscored by the Dragon Scroll, the “ancient mystical artifact of power” that has no content except a reflective surface.  The true power was your own inner nature, be true to yourself, yay. 

And then, right at the very end, the movie throws it all away.  Po, offscreen, somehow “figures out” the secret to the generic awesomesauce Ultimate Kung Fu Technique.  No visible effort or learning or revelation goes into it, and it doesn’t in any way reflect Po’s peculiarities, the ones that have defined the entire heroic arc.  We’re no longer in the territory of “capitalize on your individual talents” – we’re in Captain Marvel territory of “just be yourself and every awesome thing will come to you as a result.”  Suddenly the very notion of accomplishment becomes fake, something that you get handed out of nowhere because the protagonist is supposed to be a badass who gets a happy ending.