Kung Fu Panda

By all means, gather up the little ones and take them to this perfectly pleasant, very good-looking, modestly funny, dispiritingly unoriginal variant on the nerd-with-a-dream recipe that’s been clobbered to death in animated films for at least a decade now. Hectic as ever, Jack Black voices Po, a pot-bellied panda who lives and breathes kung fu trivia and longs to become a master. The call comes from Dustin Hoffman as a pint-sized Zen guru, under whose grumpy tutelage Po and five other trainee critters with famous voices band together to save the world from a disgruntled snow leopard (Ian McShane). The movie’s design is striking, the colors are gorgeous, and the fight sequences are pretty suave. But the adorability quotient is set a little high. And is there a moviegoing child who can’t lip-sync the smug sloganeering about following your bliss, playing to your strengths and learning to be a mensch in good times and bad?