“Everybody is Kung Fu Fighting…,” except in the new movie “Kung Fu Panda 4.” This song did not appear throughout the entire duration of this movie. The song “Kung Fu Fighting” has been an iconic theme song for the “Kung Fu Panda” series for years. The decision to not use this song in the fourth movie was because the lyrics became a controversial topic to some.

Even though the newly released “Kung Fu Panda 4,” directed by Mike Mitchell, is geared towards a younger audience, an older demographic might notice some of these underlying themes such as strength, perseverance, trust, dishonesty, forgiveness and inner peace. These traits were shown by Kung Fu Panda not changing who he was. He did not feel as though it was time for him to pass down his reign as the dragon warrior quite yet.

Kung Fu Panda (also known as Po) showed his trust to the fox by letting her out of prison. He also showed his trust to her by letting her lead the way to find the chameleon. The fox also showed dishonesty to Po by leading him to the chameleon just for him to realize the fox was working for the chameleon the whole time and was just trying to capture Po.

Because Po was known to be such a good person and friend, he was forgiving when the fox came back to him and admitted she actually wanted to be his friend.

Po taking the fox back as a friend ended up working in his favor toward the end of the movie. By the end of the movie and lots of meditating Po had eventually found his inner peace which is big deal for him and Master Shifu. Despite the fact that there is some controversy over the movie as a whole and if people enjoyed it or not, “Kung Fu Panda 4” has made its way up to the number one spot on the ranking of all movies across North America. This means that it has passed “Dune 2” which is another popular movie at this time. Additionally, “Kung Fu Panda 4” has exceeded $30 million in box office sales in North America over its second weekend being shown, and it is predicted to make over $50 million.

In my opinion, “Kung Fu Panda 4’s,” underlying themes were what helped solidify the movie’s success. Although this movie was more so meant for children, I felt as though parts of the movie were very encouraging to all ages. It relates to how friendships can be great, but sometimes they can be difficult to navigate. My thoughts about where I stand in figuring out if I really enjoyed the movie or not are pretty much in the middle because parts of the movie, to me, didn’t really feel like they belonged and were just added in for time sake. The parts that persuaded me to enjoy the movie more were when they showed Po struggling with his friendships because that is a real life struggle for people of all ages.