Saturday, November 27, 2010
jounal 12 Kung Fu Panda vs Matrix..... Daoism again
Ok so this is going back, but I randomly watched Kung Fu Panda last night; it just randomly came on and I didn’t even know what it was until I recognized the Daoism-like theme it had. Then I saw the big panda getting his butt kicked by some other gangster animals and I thought this had to be the movie the class was talking about. The whole movie was pushed on the theory of belief. Anything you believe is basically true, and anything that isn’t true is only not true because you don’t believe it. This is pretty equivalent to the Daoism way of thinking. It makes me wonder if the writer of the movie had Daoism in mind while writing it. I’ve heard that the maker of The Matrix, the other movie example of Daoism didn’t think of Daoism either, but both demonstrate it as best as my understanding can handle. The panda was much less than a warrior but really wanted to be one really bad. He had action figures of all the other kung fu characters because he looked up to them and what they did. The panda is the parallel to Neo in the matrix; both of them were the one to defeat the bad guys in the end but as the movie began nobody would have known. Although he was the worst kung fu student Master Shifu ever had, he was meant to be the dragon warrior because he was the only one who had the ability to defeat Tylon. Originally, nobody believed this other than Oogway, who is the parallel to Morpheus, but since Oogway was something like an ancestor to the rest of the animals. One difference between Kung Fu Panda and Daoism is that in the movie Tylon was the best and most dangerous warrior, but he was the bad guy. He was the one coming back to take the scroll from the village because he believed he was the dragon warrior. And in the beginning master Shifu also thought he would be as well and trained him from his youth to be so. In Daosim they don’t believe in right and wrong or good and bad. So if this was based on the real Daoism theory then Tylon wouldn’t have been a bad warrior he would have just been equal to everyone else and nobody would have thought any different of him. Also I think that since anything a person believes, or animal in this case, is reality and can’t be stopped by anything else. So if Tylon was so much of a better warrior and he really believed it I don’t see why he had to lose. We all seen what kind of warrior the panda was before his father reveals the truth to him with the scroll. The parallel with the scroll with absolutely no dragon warrior truth in it can be compared to the conversation Neo had with the fortune telling lady when she didn’t tell him at all that he was the one but what she did say made him think enough about it to know that as soon as he believed he was the one that he would be the one.
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Right. One of the things that we would have had a hard time with was if Tai Lung had been presented as anything other than a bad guy. We really need good and bad. Our minds are set in that way. However, I might argue that Po didn't defeat Tai Lung until the leopard believed that maybe the panda could actually beat him. So, perhaps we could argue that belief was still a factor in how things all went down.
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