Daily Archives: May 27, 2025

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Animated Films (3) Kung Fu Panda

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(3) KUNG FU PANDA

(2008-2016: KUNG FU PANDA 1-3. Yeah…I just can’t bring myself to count the fourth film)

 

“Legend tells of a legendary warrior whose kung fu skills were the stuff of legend”

What’s not to love about Dreamwork’s Kung Fu Panda, or for that matter, the rest of the trilogy (discounting the fourth film)?

It’s set in an anthropomorphic animal version of pre-modern China – that alone would be enough to make it awesome.

And then there’s the story, deftly balanced between comedy and epic magical or wuxia martial arts action, with CGI animation and beautiful art – for even more awesome, such that will make your enemies go blind from overexposure to pure awesomeness. And just like the titular Panda, I love kung fu, or more precisely, my kung fu movies ever since seeing Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon

The eponymous panda, Po, is a hopeless fanboy of the kung fu masters, particularly the Furious Five, composed of animal homages to kung fu styles (Tiger, Monkey, Crane, Viper and Mantis) – hopeless, that is, until he is thrust, by fate and fireworks, into the position of the legendary Dragon Warrior. Worse, he has to fight the dangerous snow leopard Tai Lung (awesomely voiced, as always, by Ian McShane), who seeks the title of Dragon Warrior for himself…

However, my favorite kung fu panda in the film trilogy is not Po, but the red panda Master Shifu – voiced by Dustin Hoffman, who combines just the right amount of wise mysticism with worldly exasperation (usually at Po).

 

FANTASY OR SF

 

Very much the fantasy side of the scale – combining both wuxia fantasy and animal fable.

 

COMEDY

 

Very much the comedic side of the scale as well.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (Special Mention: Revised) (13) Legendary Creatures

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Several legendary creatures from a picture book for children between 1790 and 1822, by Friedrich Justin Bertuch – public domain image (used in Wikipedia “Legendary Creature”)

 

 

(13) LEGENDARY CREATURES

 

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”

Except, you know, more like minotaurs and sphinxes and chimeras, oh my!

This special mention originates from the same source as my special mention in mythology books for A Dictionary of Fabulous Beasts – my love for one of the most fascinating aspects of mythology, its plethora of fabulous beasts or monsters, as reflected in the Wikipedia article for Legendary Creature (a title I obviously also used for this special mention) or the TV Tropes Index for Fictional Creatures and Our Monsters are Different (as well as its feature for Stock Monster Symbolism).

Obviously, I’ve already included a number of legendary creatures in previous special mention entries – notably Fairies, Dragons, Giants, Ghosts, Vampires and Lycanthropes, but arguably also Magic (extending to creatures created or summoned by magic) and Witchcraft (as for Magic but also extending to things like familiars, imps or even the witches themselves). They are arguably also encompassed by two special mentions subsequent to this one. This special mention is effectively for all the other legendary creatures (albeit some substantial overlap), including the really bizarre or weird ones (as encapsulated in the TV Tropes feature Our Monsters are Weird).

“A legendary creature is a type of extraordinary or supernatural being that is described in folklore (including myths and legends) and may be featured in historical accounts before modernity”.

Indeed, legendary creatures are so prolific that they exceed the capacity of any single top ten (although I’ll give it a try). The origins and classification or types of legendary creatures themselves could be the subject of their own top ten lists – as for fairies, even by broader classifications, let alone all the variations of individual types.

For origins, there’s legendary creatures as monstrous antagonists for heroes (in turn reflecting wild or chaotic forces in nature or other sources) and legendary creatures claimed in accounts of natural history as real animals – or alternatively (and my personal favorite), real animals thought to be mythical before they were confirmed or discovered as real such as the platypus. There’s legendary creatures as hybrid beasts, legendary creatures “based on real encounters or garbled accounts of travellers’ tales”, and legendary creatures as art or allegory.

As for classifications or types of legendary creatures, an interesting framework is that of the Wikipedia’s various lists of legendary creatures, particularly its list of legendary creatures by type – the various animal types (such as reptiles, serpents and worms overlapping with dragons) or plant types, artificial creatures, associations with body parts or abstract concepts, natural elements or time, natural or supernatural habitats, astronomical objects or even the Earth, humanoids, hybrids, shapeshifters, and undead.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Tropes & Other: Top 10 Ape Theories & Theses of Human Evolution (Special Mention) 6-10

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Ape skeletons – public domain image in Wikipedia “Human Evolution”

 

(6) HUNTING APE

 

Well, this one’s obvious, consistent with the hunting hypothesis – “that human evolution was primarily influenced by the activity of hunting for relatively large and fast animals, and that the activity of hunting distinguished human ancestors from other hominins”.

 

(7) GATHERING APE

 

The counterpoint to the hunting hypothesis – “that gathering rather than hunting was the main factor in the emergence of anatomically modern humans”.

 

(8) COOKING APE

 

As I opine elsewhere, much of the Stone Age might be better termed the Fire Age, for the control of fire by early humans. Among the uses of this was for cooking food, leading to the cooking hypothesis, which “proposes that the ability to cook allowed for the brain size of hominids to increase over time”.

 

(9) BRAINY APE (EXPENSIVE TISSUE)

 

Another one that’s obvious – most theories of human evolution focus on the brain and brain size, including the expensive tissue hypothesis or ETH that “relates brain and gut size in evolution (specifically in human evolution)”.

Essentially, to evolve its large brain, humans had to sacrifice “less energy on other expensive tissues” – which was “achieved by eating an easy-to-digest diet and evolving a smaller, less energy-intensive gut”.

Again in tabletop terms, humans were minmax players, minimizing their gut stats to max out their brain stats (minimizing their constitution to max out intelligence?)

 

(10)  ANDROGYNOUS APE (REDUCED S€XUAL DIMORPHISM)

 

Well, not really androgynous – humans still have pronounced sexual dimorphism but it is decreased and I wanted a catchy ape title for it.