A recent Q&A with the co-director of Kung Fu Panda 4 has revealed that, for some reason, an early version of the film was planned to be a live action, animation hybrid.
It’s really hard to pull off live action and animation hybrid films – Who Framed Roger Rabbit is probably the only one to truly do it successfully to this day. You have to put the work in to make it convincing, which is why I’m really glad to hear that Kung Fu Panda 4 isn’t such a hybrid like originally planned. Stephanie Stine, co-director of the recently released sequel, recently took part in the Kung Fu Panda Reddit community’s Discord server, where she answered a whole range of questions about the film. And one of the weirdest revelations is easily the fact that, before she was brought on, the film would have featured live action humans in a mostly animated film.
“The original story… actually had Zhen and The Chameleon be human (she was actually known as The Collector before we ditched the humans idea). They came from a city called… Hu-man city,” explains Stine. “The original story was supposed to be hybrid live action/animation, that’s why there were humans. For some reason before I came on, the leadership team scrapped the hybrid live action idea. They kept the humans on for a while though, up until our 2nd animatic screening if I remember correctly.”
