“Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is a Mystery, But Today is a Gift. That is why it’s called The Present.”
Nearly twenty years after the first film, a cartoon about a panda still rings true in its message of self-worth, self-acceptance, and emotional growth.
The profound life lessons that people carry out of the Kung Fu Panda films tend to outlive the jokes, which is impressive as it undeniably proves once and for all that cartoons are not just for kids.
Watch the first three films back to back and one thread runs through all of them. Your body, your training and your beginnings are where the story starts, and the films spend about six hours depicting the wholesome journey of an unlikely hero.
What follows are three essential life lessons that Kung Fu Panda teaches us, among many.
1. Self-Knowledge Outweighs Brute Strength
Tai Lung was the best pick for the Dragon Warrior if one looked only at the amount of time devoted (not to forget the cool moves). It’s easy to overlook that. He trained from infancy under the finest master in the valley, mastered every form in the discipline, and wanted the Dragon Scroll with fervent devotion.
On paper, at least, he is the strongest candidate any institution could hope for. Master Oogway looks at him and says no.
Years later, the same Master picks a panda who arrives by accident, mid-firework, having just failed to climb a flight of stairs; okay, an extremely long flight of stairs.
The temptation is to neatly file Tai Lung under “villain” and move on, but that’s reducing him. His ambition is the reason he could do any of it, the same drive that carries people through school, through the last two miles, through the long years when nobody is watching. What he lacked was any version of himself that existed independently of the scroll. He needed it to tell him what he was, which left the answer permanently in somebody else’s keeping.
Po’s advantage over him seems miniscule. He initially has no technique, no lineage and no plan. What he has is sheer humanity as expressed in his openness to learning, an acceptance of support and guidance, and a deep love (of life, among others).
He wants to do his best. He fails, he has doubts, he suffers, and berates himself. He embodies the best of humanity while dealing with the darkest of our demons. That distinction decides everything that follows. When he finally unrolls the Dragon Scroll and finds nothing there but his own reflection, he can read it. Tai Lung stares at the same blank surface and sees an insult, because a blank scroll cannot fill the void within.
Mr Ping, Po’s father, approaches the same lesson from another POV. The secret ingredient in their secret family recipe is Nothing! It is the cook, their values, and their passion that imbue the food with its taste.
Kung Fu Panda puts its whole case into the one image of the dragon scroll. Strength is legible. Culture rewards it, promotes it, prints it on magazine covers and writes it into job descriptions, and there is nothing dishonest about wanting to be strong.
Self-knowledge is quieter and much harder to certify. Nobody can put “has met himself” on a CV. When pressure arrives, and Oogway’s whole position is that it always does, the person who knows what they value tends to make better calls than the person who only knows what they have collected.
2. Your Body Deserves More Than Judgement
Po does the body shaming himself, before anyone else can. He arrives at the Jade Palace narrating his own unsuitability out loud, cheerfully, getting in front of the insult. Most of us have made that joke about ourselves first, so the room laughs alongside us rather than at us. It works, briefly. It also costs something, and the first Kung Fu Panda film is honest about the cost.
Shifu’s first instinct is the one most of us would have had. He tries to make Po smaller and faster, putting him through the regimen built for a tiger, a monkey, a crane, a snake and a mantis. It failed comprehensively because it was designed for five animals, none of whom was a panda. Everyone in the room, Po included, reads that failure as Po’s failure.
The turn happens in the kitchen. Shifu watches Po drop into the splits to reach a biscuit jar on a high shelf, scale a cupboard with the fluency of someone who has done it a thousand times, and move at a speed nobody has seen from him on the training floor. The body is the same body. The task changed. Shifu rebuilds the entire regimen around dumplings and it starts working.
At this shift, Shifu doesn’t run a body positivity session in the Jade Palace. He does something more practical and considerably less comfortable: he accepts that the fault lies in the method, and he rebuilds it. Po’s belly then turns out to be a genuine asset in a fight, absorbing blows that would fold a smaller animal.
By the second Kung Fu Panda film Po describes himself as a big fat panda again, and the delivery has changed entirely. In the first film the phrase was an apology issued in advance. By the second it is a claim, said with the definite article and a certain amount of swagger. Nothing about him has altered physically; what has altered is who holds the description.
A film with a fat protagonist that never once frames his natural appetite as a moral failing was unusual in 2008 and remains unusual now.
3. The Start of Our Story Doesn’t Dictate Our Path
Po, a Panda, had always assumed he was Mr Ping’s, a Goose’s, son, in the way one takes for granted that the earth won’t shake. When he finally asks, Ping tells him the truth: Po arrived as an infant in a crate of radishes at the back of the shop, and Ping simply kept him and raised him as his own.
The truth doesn’t invalidate his past. The noodles, the childhood, the father who raised him are all still real. What Po struggles with is holding his past with his present, that he was found and that he was loved, and for a while the second gets buried under the shock of the first.
Shen, the second Kung Fu Panda film’s antagonist, embodies what happens when a person can only hold one. He too was shaped by a beginning he didn’t choose, a prophecy and the losing of one’s parents. The wound is real, and the film never pretends otherwise. But Shen allows his beginning to overshadow his entire story, and spends the rest of his life turning old pain into new weapons.
With time, introspection, and support, Po arrives somewhere harder to reach. What Po slowly learns is to accept his beginning, and to let it explain his origins, without letting it decide the rest. Inner Peace.
The third film could have undone all of this. Li Shan, Po’s birth father, arrives warm and overjoyed to have found him. Mr Ping follows, and initially does not take it well. For a long stretch the film simply lets him be jealous, without hurrying him toward being gracious about it.
What Kung Fu Panda depicts is that Po doesn’t have to choose. Both men are his father. Po is allowed to want the panda village and the noodle shop, the father who gave him life and the father who gave him a home. Anyone who has ever held two families, two homes, or two versions of themselves knows how rarely we allow ourselves to embody both.
By the end, Po is asked to teach, and his first lesson falls apart for the very reason Shifu’s once did. He tries to turn the pandas into the Furious Five, and they are no more built for that than he was built for the tiger’s training. What works, in the end, is teaching them to fight as pandas, with rolling, and hugging, and a fair amount of napping.
Po has become the teacher now, and he passes on the lesson he once had to learn the hard way: you don’t help people by making them into someone else. The panda who was told he didn’t belong grows up to build a place where every kind of animal belongs.
Across the three Kung Fu Panda films, one idea holds everything together.
What you have achieved is not the same as knowing yourself.
A method that keeps failing you might simply be the wrong method. And where you began is where your story starts, not where it is bound to end.
Oogway was right about the present being a gift. Yesterday is history and tomorrow a mystery, but today, who you are and what you do with it, is still yours to write.
If you need help and support writing your story, we’re always just a call away!