Finding his inner panda was not too much of a stretch for Jack Black.
All it took was finding the essence of his inner Jack.
With Black providing the lead voice, the animated comedy “Kung Fu Panda” spins the tale of an unlikely savior who finds that becoming the best version of himself is the true hero’s path.
For Black’s Po the panda, a clumsy, tubby behemoth picked by destiny to become a martial-arts master, that meant playing on his strengths, such as using food as an incentive to learn his own variation of kung fu moves.
For chubby funnyman Black, the unlikely transition from character roles to leading man required a similar effort to define his own voice and persona onscreen.
Before his breakout role as a condescending record-shop clerk in “High Fidelity,” he had been more of a mimic than an actor, Black said. His side gig as a member of the music duo Tenacious D changed that.
“I was always trying to kind of imitate the actors that I liked. I was always kind of just doing what I thought the great actors would do,” Black said in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival. “And then I kind of found my own voice when I wrote songs and sketches for Tenacious D. I was just being me. I wasn’t trying to be somebody else, like John Malkovich or whoever my favorite actor was at the time. And that came through with ‘High Fidelity’ for the first time. It was just me doing my thing, and it’s the same thing as this movie.
“Be your own hero. It makes a lot of sense and resonates with me, because I feel there’s a lot of truth to that.”
Black, 38, previously dabbled in animation with voices as a tiger in “Ice Age” and a vegetarian shark in “Shark Tale,” the latter played as “kind of a nebbishy New Yorker, Woody Allen-type,” he recalled.
For “Kung Fu Panda,” DreamWorks Animation boss Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted the real Black — his own voice, his own personality. Pitching the story to Black, Katzenberg even had some raw animation of the character prepared with dialogue borrowed from “High Fidelity,” Black said.
“It was a fun experience not hiding behind a character voice this time. When you do the character voice, that can be fun, and it can inform the character, but you also get distracted by that, and this way, I could just focus on what was funny in the scene,” Black said.
“In a way, I feel like this is my most fleshed out and the most satisfied I’ve been with a role,” Black said.
“Kung Fu Panda” directors Mark Osborne and John Stevenson recalled a magazine interview in which Black pondered his childhood in a way that fit the character of Po, a panda toiling in his family’s noodle restaurant while sensing he had another calling elsewhere.
Po idolizes ancient China’s martial-arts experts, including a tigress (voiced by Angelina Jolie), a viper (Lucy Liu) and a monkey (Jackie Chan).
The cast also features Dustin Hoffman providing the voice of the martial-arts master reluctantly teaching Po the moves after the panda is declared a prophesied hero.
