Last summer, my sister really wanted to go see the Barbie movie so I reluctantly agreed, and it turned out to be a pretty good movie I guess. But wait, isn’t this supposed to be a Kung Fu Panda 4 review?
OK, so the reason that I watched Kung Fu Panda 4 was because we went to a movie theater to watch Barbie but their projector had lens issues and the film was blurry, and I haven’t been to a theater in a long time so I assumed theaters were just low-resolution, but then an employee came and apologized and gave us all free passes to see another movie. Three days ago, my sister and I finally decided to use the passes, but there weren’t very many good options to choose from. There’s a Dune movie, but I read the book Dune in 6th grade and thought it was really boring so that permanently gave me a bad impression of the Dune franchise, even though I’d probably enjoy the book a lot more if I read it now. The theater was also showing Shrek 2 for some reason, which we totally should have watched instead, but nope, we picked Kung Fu Panda 4. I mean, Alek likes Kung Fu Panda so it can’t be too bad, right?
Wrong. It’s a pretty bad movie. Like sure, it’s not torture to watch it, but it definitely can’t compare with the cultural icon that is Shrek 2. (I have a running joke with some of my friends that we should enlighten ourselves by watching Shrek 2, but we never do.) But actually, I don’t want to rant about Kung Fu Panda 4 because you can already find rants about it online (“the plot twist came out of nowhere and was also perfectly predictable”). Instead, I want to write about foxes.
There’s a character in Kung Fu Panda 4 who is obviously redeemable anti-hero material the second she appears in the film, and she looks like a wolf but repeatedly claims to be a fox despite having gray fur? My sister and I got into a dispute over whether that character wears eyeliner or not, since I personally think it’s ridiculous for animals to have eyeliner. Actually, I’m just not familiar enough with the list of fox species, so it turns out this character is a corsac fox which inhabit northern China:
Surely the filmmakers could have picked a less cliché animal like a civet or a Pallas’s cat, and plus, what’s up with perpetuating stereotypes of foxes as cunning thieves? These majestic creatures deserve better than that.
A few years ago, my sister and my mother saw a red fox while walking outside and my mother also saw one while jogging, so I obsessively wanted to see a fox in real life too. Fortunately, if you wait long enough, a low probability event will happen eventually. So a year later, I stumbled across a red fox very early in the morning, but it hopped away before I could snap a picture of it. Apparently they can jump up to six feet (1.8 m) high!
Kevin said that his family owns a bunch of chickens in their backyard, which sometimes attracts foxes. He dislikes foxes though so he hasn’t taken any photos of them yet.
This line is reserved for a future photo of the foxes in Kevin’s backyard. Kevin successfully photographed a fox, but he doesn’t want me to include the photo here.
Another fascinating thing about foxes is that they’ve been domesticated, which you can read about here and here, so it’s possible to have a pet fox although they’re terrible pets.
I was going to end this blog post here, but I guess I’m obligated by the title to say a bit more about Kung Fu Panda 4. I did watch the original Kung Fu Panda for reasons I won’t get into to ensure this review doesn’t get sidetracked again, but I haven’t seen Kung Fu Panda 2 or 3 in many years. Surely those sequels weren’t this bad, right? Anyways, you should not watch this film unless you’re Alek, and go watch Shrek 2 or read Alek’s short story instead.