Yes. I think part of the reason being that Yoda was such a compelling character for me. I was ten years old at the time and connecting more to the significant parts of the story like the spiritual and mystical aspects. I remember seriously pondering things like "Why did Luke's face show up in the helmet when Darth Vader's head gets chopped off?"
When I read about George Lucas' desire to give the next generation a mythology that didn't have it, I was so in need of something like that as a kid. I wanted those kinds of stories and those archetypes. After Star Wars, I would wonder why would someone choose to be bad like Darth Vader? Why wouldn't everyone want to be like Luke Skywalker?
It wasn't later on until college that I started learning about Joseph Campbell and I got serious about studying film that I realized how much of that stuff resonated for me as a kid. I'm so thrilled to show the films to my kids now that they're old enough. I wanted to wait until they were old enough to absorb it. My son was six and my daughter was eight-and-a-half. Now my son is obsessed as I was. In fact, I made my son a Boba Fett costume for Halloween two years ago. It was a Day Glo vinyl toy version of the costume and I made him a helmet that's pretty sweet.
I may have shown them a little bit of it like the Boba Fett cartoon. I remember when I was a kid seeing the ad for it in TV Guide after I missed seeing it on TV and I was so upset. But later on when I finally saw it, I was like "What?" At least it had the Wilhelm Scream in it.
I don't suppose there's a Wilhelm Scream in Kung Fu Panda?
There absolutely is! You'll have to watch the movie to find out where we put it. It was very important to us that any future Wilhelm Scream montage video will hopefully have a clip of Kung Fu Panda in it. We forgot to tell our crew about it before the screening, so I keep forgetting to publicize it.
Why do you think stories like Star Wars affect kids and adults in such a profound way?
It's so imaginative yet familiar on that core instinctual level of human beings as storytellers. Those archetypes are so relatable. It's a prefect blend of an imaginative new thing mixed with classic ideas that are so fundamental to us. The Star Wars logo is so iconic. If there's one within 500 feet of me, I stop. It gives me a warm feeling. It's so universal. The reason why it's so iconic no matter what country you're in, there's those core ideas that we can all relate to. It was so much fun to see such a fresh take on the Hero's Journey and the idea of the bad guy wearing black and the good guys wear white. Some people criticize Kung Fu Panda and said, "Oh, it's nothing new - it's the same old believe-in-yourself story." But have you really seen a panda become a Kung Fu master? Of course, there are only seven stories in the world, we just tried to tell a really unique version of it. And I think that's what George did really well. As a kid I didn't know how well until now.
How did Star Wars influence Kung Fu Panda? There seems to be some Yoda-eque dialog, especially in the scene where the wise, old Oogway when he says to Po, "Quit, don't quit? Noodles, don't noodles?".
We took Yoda as an inspiration for both Oogway and Shifu. Yoda is far more enlightened than Shifu is. And Oogway is based on the wise sage Eastern Master that was an inspiration for Yoda as well. But for us it's hard not to equate our three-foot-tall guy who can kick butt with the Star Wars three-foot-tall guy who can also kick butt. Within the movie, I learned a lot about the story structure of the Hero's Journey. The lens I always look through is Star Wars, and that's the example I would look at. We took a lot of inspiration from Star Wars without referencing it directly. But we also didn't directly reference any of the King Fu films that inspired us either.
Of course, Tai Lung being a student of Master Shifu and then going bad could be seen as a Star Wars Obi-Wan/Anakin reference. But then again father-son issues are nothing new. We wanted to create a rich, complex backstory for our characters that worked so well for the Star Wars universe. It made a lot of sense to have Shifu train both the Ying and the Yang of this final battle. Shifu's burden is equal to the gift that Po gives him in allowing Po to be the solution to Shifu's greatest problem.
Have you ever had the chance to meet George Lucas?
The craziest thing for me was to be at the Kung Fu Panda premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and to sit down to see our movie for the first time with an audience, after we had just walked through the gauntlet of a thousand photographers, and I look a row back and see George Lucas. All my senses just kind of blanked. And I know Jack Black (who voices Po) is a big Star Wars fan too, but he was a few seats over so I couldn't elbow him in the ribs to check George out. In fact, the first thing I said to Jack after we got our standing ovation when the movie ended was, "George Lucas! George Lucas!"
I was so thrilled that he was there. It all came full circle. When I was introduced to George at the after party, I said that, "I'm sure you've heard this a million times, but Star Wars was the reason I went into filmmaking." I think I may have scared him a little. (laughs)
I had the sincere pleasure of being introduced to him as the director of the movie he had just seen, and he seemed to like it, and I heard him laughing while he was watching it, so the conversation started him complimenting the movie and the animation in particular -- and that was great since I worked with the animators a lot. And that's how it started, and then I went on and on about how I love Star Wars. And I think 30 seconds into the conversation, he got the picture.
