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. Here’s a photo that he took:
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.