Kung Fu Panda starts out with a dream. Po the Panda (Jack Black) dreams of being a Kung Fu hero, rather than the chubby son of a noodle shop proprietor (who, oddly enough, isn't a panda but a goose). In Po's dream, the animation style is surprisingly sophisticated, beautifully graphic 2-D animation, vaguely reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away). Might this movie look differently than every other piece of big budget animation since Toy Story?

Not so much. Po soon awakens and the waking world looks as you'd expect it, CG animation of the sort that Pixar typically excels at and DreamWorks, who made this film, does well enough. And hey, kung fu is cool (as any Brooklyn baby with a Bruce Lee onesie would tell you); pandas are cute. What's not to love?

Well, the writing for one. The story—schlubby panda Po is actually the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy, he's the only one who can fight the evil snow leopard, only Po can save us, but first he must get in shape—manages to be both too simplistic and convoluted. There are a few nice set pieces along the way. The nasty snow leopard's kung-fu-fighting escape from jail is stunning, and a scene in which Panda trains by being bribed with dumplings by his Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) elicited laughter from both the kiddies and adults in the screening audience.

But it's all too shallowly earnest. In one scene, Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), a wise turtle and the inventor of kung fu, dispenses this sage advice to Po: "Today is a gift, that is why it is called the present." Even the stickiest, most tantrum-prone tots deserve better than such cliches. While the filmmakers have assembled an admirable cast—from Angelina Jolie to Jackie Chan to Seth Rogen—the mediocre script inhibits them and they're never allowed to ham it up as much as they need to in order to pump some life into the story. But hey, preggers Angelina Jolie looked like a total goddess at the film's Cannes premiere, so that was something, right?

The best animated features of recent memory, say last year's Ratatouille or 2006's Monster House, take audiences on a longish, strange trip to places where rats are master chefs or houses are really freakin' scary. They might make adults in the theatre wonder if the animators are just a bunch of ingenious stoners who are really good with computers. Kung Fu Panda never creates such a fully intoxicating world; this furry friend is so busy telling us to be all that we can be that he forgets to make us laugh. He forgets to make his fur bristle and glisten just so in the sunlight, to make us feel as though we're high on something, celluloid or otherwise. Watching the panda fight the good kung fu fight, the thin world of martial arts animals only makes you want to go home and watch Jackie Chan in a real kung fu movie, not one where he voices a cartoon monkey.