Last weekend my daughter was babysitting an eight-year-old acquaintance and I took them to see a movie, something appropriate for the younger girl. Thus, I found myself watching the new Dream Works movie, "Kung Fu Panda." Perhaps this is a commentary on my lack of intellectual depth: I don't see the deep and serious film, "Youth Without Youth," I see the pop cultural triviality. Oh well, just the life of a parent, I guess…
In any event, two things came to mind: 1) the Taoist themes that are quite accessible for children; and 2) the question of orientalism.
Let's discuss orientalism first. In its Saidian expression, orientalism suggests the depiction of a foreign culture in a manner that subordinates and exoticizes it for purposes of domination, or something like that. Is that going on here? I think not. The childish images of Chinese animals as people could appear to be infantilizing ancient traditions of philosophy and martial arts. But for orientalism to really be at work a significant power differential has to be in play: the politically and materially more powerful cultural creator stands above the less powerful source of images and ideas. I don't think this is now the case for at least two reasons.
First, China is no longer weak. It is a dynamic economic power with significant military power and global political influence. Chinese people can and do push back against any foreign-created images for whatever reason they want (as some are now doing against Kung Fu Panda's producer Steven Spielberg for his Olympics-related criticisms of China). China is also the producer of its own cultural products that move out into the world and shape understandings and desires. Indeed, through its tourism industry the PRC actively participates in something like the the orientalization of its own culture, selling, and profiting from, the commodification of social difference. Yet even if that characterization – the orientalized now becoming the orientalizer – is debatable, the colonialist power differential that Said assumed in his analysis (he was, after all, focusing mostly on periods of formal colonization), simply does not exist now in the case of China.
This is not to say that American and other perceptions of China are free of bias. Far from it. There will always be politically and culturally influenced differences of perception and understanding. Rather, I only mean to suggest here that the power inequalities that underwrite the dominating effects of orientalism have changed.
Secondly, on the question of orientalism, the global context has changed in other ways. Globalization, the accelerated flow of cultural images and ideas across the world, transforms, I believe, the dynamics of cultural politics. In Said's analysis, the images created by Western power holders had a certain authority based on their rarity. The total number of images of the "East" and the number of Western travelers to the "East" were both rather small. Thus, those images that were created did not have to compete with many others and, so, came to claim a large and important place in the imagination of many people in the "West." Not so today. Kung Fu Panda, and any other foreign-created image of China, must now jostle with thousands, perhaps millions, of images and ideas and narratives, produced in many locations, including China, that depict many facets of Chinese culture or provide multiple perspectives on any one aspect of Chinese culture. Globalization multiplies and diversifies the sources of cultural production, and accelerates their movement internationally, to such an extent that no one source can claim the kind of authority that the purveyors of orientalism could in the past. In short, it's hard out there for an orientalist….
In short, the power relations between the US and China have changed so much in the past thirty years that I think the Saidian notion of orientalism no longer captures the political-cultural dyanamic between the two. To repeat, bias and perceptual difference persist, but not in the same political context nor with the same political effects as classic orientalism.
Thus, I will assert that, whatever its flaws, Kung Fu Panda is not orientalist.
But is it Taoist? Long story short: yes, it has obvious Taoist themes, even if they are subsumed within a formulaic children's animation.
Warning: spoiler alert
The main theme of the movie is: nothing matters. By "nothing" is meant that there is no particular skill or knowledge that will universally solve life's problems. Each person has his or her own set of abilities and disabilities (Te, or integrity), and those innate qualities shape our destiny. While it is true the Panda works himself (unpersuasively) into being a martial arts master – which might suggest that we can become something that is not innately within us – he does so only after his teacher discovers what truly motivates the Panda: food. Silly though it may be, this is an example of the particularity of Te in Tao.
In order to make this theme stand out clearly, the movie uses the character of the Panda's father (inexplicably a duck. Who is the mother?) as a foil. He is a noodle maker. That is his Te, and the Te of his family for generations (to get a bit Confucian about it…). That is where he finds his place in Tao. And at a critical point in the narrative he reveals to the Panda the secret ingredient of his secret ingredient noodle soup: there is no secret ingredient. In other words, the secret ingredient is nothing. Wu-wei, nothing doing; nothing's own doing. Do nothing and nothing will be undone. Nothing is the key.
I only wonder how American kids will respond to that message. Do nothing. I can hear the frustrated parents howling already…..
The Useless Tree 
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