Episode 166 - Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson & Mark Osborne, 2008) (with John Yorke)
Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson & Mark Osborne, 2008).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Episode 166 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast high kicks its way into the world of DreamWorks’ successful Kung Fu Panda franchise (2008-) with this look at the series’ first big-screen instalment, Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson & Mark Osborne, 2008), with very special guest John Yorke. John is a television producer, screenwriter, editor, and author, who was Head of Channel 4 Drama (2003–2005), controller of BBC drama production (2006–2012) where he founded the BBC Writers Academy, and more recently managing director of Company Pictures (2013–2015). He is now teaching screenwriting via his own company, John Yorke Story, and is the author of Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (Penguin, 2014) and Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Story (Penguin, 2026). Topics include the tension between showing and telling that underpins the character development of Kung Fu Panda’s protagonist Po (Jack Black); story as central to the film’s effectiveness as a martial arts animated comedy and the spectacle of the animated body in physicalising certain narrative beats; storytelling within a commercial animation context and how the medium’s narrative strategies are enabled by animation as an industrial art form; and how Kung Fu Panda functions as a popular fantasy film merging Chinese with American cultural concerns yet remains indebted to longstanding folkloric structures of narrative.
This podcast is sponsored by the project “UK-China Animation: Co-Creating Research and Knowledge Exchange,” led by the University of Nottingham and funded by the British Council through an award from its Going Global Partnerships programme, which builds stronger, more inclusive, internationally connected higher education and Technical and Vocational Education and Training systems (TVET).
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**
Suggested Readings
Chung, Hye Jean. 2012. “Kung Fu Panda: Animated Animal Bodies as Layered Sites of (Trans)National Identities.” The Velvet Light Trap 69 (Spring): 27-37.
Lugo-Lugo, Carmen R. and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. 2009. ““Look Out New World, Here We Come”?: Race, Racialization, and Sexuality in Four Children's Animated Films by Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks.” Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 9, no. 2 (April): 166–178.
Holliday, Christopher. 2018. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Summers, Sam. 2020. DreamWorks Animation: Intertextuality and Aesthetics in Shrek and Beyond. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.