John Stevenson takes the action in family animation seriously, and Kung Fu Panda benefits from it. His film with Mark Osborne is good company, though the care in its fights exceeds the imagination in its writing.
Fi1m perspective
In Kung Fu Panda (2008), the fights are allowed to work as fights before they have to provide a joke. John Stevenson and Mark Osborne take the martial arts seriously enough to make a panda doing kung fu worth more than a passing smile. We warmed to Po because Jack Black’s appealing voice performance makes him worth rooting for even when the screenplay gives him little interesting to say. It is a good-humoured family adventure, with better action than storytelling.
Stevenson’s background in storyboarding and character design helps explain his attention to visual storytelling. His work with Jim Henson and on Count Duckula (1988) preceded his time as head of story at DreamWorks, where he also directed episodes of Father of the Pride (2004). Kung Fu Panda was his feature debut, developed over four years with Osborne. During that process, it moved away from parody towards a character-led martial-arts comedy. We would be wary of assigning that decision to one director alone; the partnership matters to what works on screen.
The opening 2D sequence in Kung Fu Panda shows a welcome willingness to vary the visual style, and fits a director accustomed to working across puppetry and animation. But Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger’s screenplay does little to disguise how familiar the story is. The supporting characters deserve more attention, and the directors’ care with the action cannot supply the character work the writing leaves out. Black keeps it appealing, but there is only so much a voice performance can do.
His later directing work includes the short The Polar Bears (2012) and the solo-directed feature Sherlock Gnomes (2018), which recasts Sherlock Holmes as a garden gnome. The latter carries the familiar risk of a family film whose central joke is already there in the title. Its mixed-to-negative reception, with complaints about thin plotting and reliance on puns and references, suggests the writing remained a problem. Start with Kung Fu Panda, for Black and the fights, without expecting the story to surprise.
Biography
John Stevenson is a British animator, film director and puppeteer. He is best known for co-directing the DreamWorks Animation feature Kung Fu Panda (2008) with Mark Osborne.
Stevenson began his career working on Jim Henson productions including The Muppet Show, The Great Muppet Caper, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. He later moved to the United States and joined DreamWorks Animation in 1998 as head of story, contributing to films such as Shrek and Madagascar. He co-directed Kung Fu Panda over four years and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2009. Stevenson also directed Sherlock Gnomes (2018).
