Check out the Kung Fu Panda 2 trailers and clips at AWNtv!

They may look the same but they're new and improved. All images courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Don't be fooled by the soft-spoken Jennifer Yuh Nelson. DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg says she's a powerful and persuasive presence. She knows how to tell a story emotionally and visually. No wonder the former head of story is now the first female to helm an animated feature solo at a major studio. Yuh Nelson told us what it was like bringing Kung Fu Panda 2 (now playing) to life.;

Bill Desowitz: What was the experience like for you going solo for the first time in continuing Po's story?

Jennifer Yuh Nelson: It put a great sense of responsibility for all of us to provide something that would be worthy of the first movie, and also to make a sequel that had a reason for being there instead of being a sequel for sequel's sake. That was the challenge and we worked very hard for a deeper understanding of the characters in the sequel. And you have to raise the stakes and the understanding more to have an impact on the audience.

BD: How were you able to achieve more, particularly a greater glimpse of China?

JYN: Well, certainly one of the things that helped was we went to China and wandered around and got a feel for the actual source of the material. And that really gave us a first person experience of what these places looked like and felt like and what the colors looked like. You can't replicate that on the internet. And the same production designer and art director, Raymond Zibach and Tang Heng, came back and they carried through the look of the first film, and were freed by the advancements in technology to increase the scale of a lot of the sets that we had. On the first film we could only go so far before technologically hitting a wall, and on this one we could build a whole city and it was all completely practical and have the characters punching everything, which was lovely.

BD: You mean the lighting and rendering advancements?

JYN: Definitely. Now there is far more complexity in every shot. You can see a lot of fabric and fur and detail in the cloth and backgrounds. Three years, technologically, is an eternity, the way things move. And we're benefitting a lot of R&D that came off the first film, and a lot of the R&D that happened during the second film that made things like Lord Shen [the villainous peacock] even possible.

Lord Shen benefitted from R&D for feathers, cloth and rigging.

JYN: R&D with feathers, with cloth, with complexity of the rig. Shen can move his tail, he fights, he's got flowing robes. Having him walk across a room would've been difficult and we have him doing crazed acrobatics. That would've been incredibly memory intensive for the computers.

BD: And the rigs have been improved for all the other characters, too?

JYN: They had to be rebuilt from the ground up, which is shocking, because they look the same and we worked very hard to make them look the same. The double edged sword with the technology is that the old programs wouldn't talk to the new programs, so we had to rebuild all these returning characters to be the same.