We looked at a lot of martial arts films, both classic and modern. We looked at everything from the Shaw Brothers films to Kurosawa’s films, like Seven Samurai and Ran, for their sense of epic scale and character. We also looked at more recent films like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers for their choreography and visual poetry. We wanted to combine the grandeur of those films with the fun of our own story.
Films That Influenced Kung Fu Panda
