Kung Fu Panda: Animated Animal Bodies as Layered Sites of (Trans)National Identities

The point is right away to go beyond, in one fell swoop, the first glance and thus to see there where this glance is blind, to open one's eyes wide there where one does not see what one sees. One must see, at first sight, what does not let itself be seen. And this is invisibility itself. For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw, the error of first sight is to see, and not to notice the invisible. If one does not give oneself up to this invisibility, then the table-commodity, immediately perceived, remains what it is not, a simple thing deemed to be trivial and too obvious.

—Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

An animated panda performs martial arts as gracefully and convincingly as any live-action kung fu master, a computer-generated monster creates havoc among a crowd of terrified bystanders in a populated metropolitan area, and a blue humanoid alien clumsily knocks over objects in a laboratory. The smooth integration of these imaginary figures into the virtual landscape of the cinematic space and the fluid sensation of movement across physical locations and digitally created environments embody fantasies of mobility across geographical, national, and ontological borders (e.g., real and virtual states). Global aspirations are manifested in a growing number of contemporary films via narrative, aesthetic, style, editing techniques, camera movement, and visual and thematic tropes of cross-border travel and migration. Digital technology is now frequently utilized in these films in the service of verisimilitude to achieve the technical and imaginative compositing of real and computer-generated environments.

Mediated spaces and bodies in such films are created by a collaborative form of transnational filmmaking that utilizes the economic or cultural resources and creative talent of multiple nations, which are increasingly circulated globally via digital packages and formats. Situated in the intersections of digitization and globalization, these spaces and bodies are created by a combination of computer-generated effects and transnational labor in a globally dispersed production pipeline. As such, these mediated spaces and bodies become contested, layered sites where global aspirations and nationalist desires collaborate, collide, and create frictions that are actualized and embodied in various forms. Thus a new mode of visuality is needed to recognize these frictions and to detect the dissonance among the multiple composited layers beneath the façade of seamlessness that is cultivated visually and discursively throughout the processes of production, promotion, and distribution.

This essay focuses on disjunctions and ruptures that inevitably leave traces and residues in digitally mediated environments in order to make them visible and thereby reveal how a rhetorical and aesthetic emphasis on seamless effects created by digital technologies masks the material workflows of global production pipelines. More specifically, I identify the computer-generated bodies in the DreamWorks animated film Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne and John Stevenson, 2008) as animated figures of transnationality, that is to say, sites of layered (trans)national identities that depend on globally dispersed and diasporic talent and globally distributed media images. Even though computer-generated bodies are often regarded as dematerialized because they are simulated images produced by digitized physical bodies and camera movements, they can also be described as material through visual and sonic residues that anchor them to physical bodies. I assert that layered traces of national bodies become reanimated and recorporealized along the production pipeline through the bodies and voices of actors, martial arts coordinators, animators, and widely recognized kung fu artists such as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan (who participated in the film as a voice actor). That is to say, different types of bodies—spectral and physical, animal and human, animated and live action—are layered to form transnational entities. This recognition prompts thinking beyond the boundaries of the national while avoiding the facile, overgeneralizing transcendence of borders frequently invoked in discussions of the transnational.

Many film scholars are recognizing transnational film studies as a valid and vital field of inquiry. In her preface to World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, Natasa Durovicova poses the question, "How then should the geopolitical imaginary of the discipline...