The filmmakers started with the panda designs, studying how the character's proportions worked and how his different lines flowed together.

Getting DreamWorks' "most ambitious project ever" off the ground called for plenty of planning -- and some crossed fingers. According to Manninen, who was responsible for developing the film's workflow processes, "a production like this is so complex it needs a holistic view to make the choices that make it all possible. We started with the panda [Po, voiced by Jack Black], our main character. We looked at the designs Nicolas Marlet came up with for him -- how his proportions work, how his different lines flow together. Once you put that into the computer, it's not a drawing any more. You need to find a way to emulate that shape language in a dimensional object; it's a translation process we needed to be very careful about. We have a great partnership with Hewlett-Packard and we knew 64-bit processors were on the horizon. We made some assumptions -- 'we know we can't do this today, but when we get 64-bit in two years…'"

Manninen explains that the extra power provided by the new processors "allowed us to use a larger memory footprint when rendering our scenes. In 32-bit you can use a maximum of four gigabytes. Each render you send off needs to be managed down complexity-wise to fit within four gigs to be efficient on our render farm. 64-bit lets us double that to eight gigs and put more complex scenes through the farm. We could spend less time breaking scenes down to fit within allocated memory and more time creating the pictures. Then it became a process of finding work-flow solutions that used processing power rather than hand-tweaking to free our artists to be productive and creative.

"A perfect example in our film is feathers. Traditionally they've been accomplished in visual effects-type scenarios -- to make feathers look good in a specific shot, you'd have an army of people doing frame-by-frame fixes. We knew from the get-go our world was populated by furry and feathered animals, all wearing simulated clothing on top of that. We needed solutions that made the process more or less automated. We spent a fair amount of time early on -- between 2004 and '06 -- developing techniques that sent feathers through an automatic 'de-interpenetration process' to keep them from lying or moving against each other, or buzzing or flickering in any way. There's a SIGGRAPH paper on it; I know a lot about the process and I don't even understand half of it."

Kung Fu Panda's main characters include a villainous snow leopard (r) who fights kung fu master Shifu.

While Kung Fu Panda's main characters are a varied assortment of exquisitely rendered beasts -- from a villainous snow leopard to a glowering tigress, a wizened turtle or a surly red panda, for example -- the hundreds of background critters are restricted to rabbits, pigs and ducks (oh my)...

"We could only afford to do three species," Zibach admits. "We wanted to make sure they were the most innocent characters you could find -- and an interesting variation of body shapes. After a lot of drawing and whittling down and theorizing, the directors picked those three. It was interesting trying to get as much variation as you could out of them. We'd shift their proportions around a bit -- giving the ducks longer or shorter necks, sizing the rabbits up or down, or having some pigs with oversize heads. It worked out well because the costuming added an additional layer of variation; it made it feel like there were a lot of different characters there."

Another shortcut Panda took was eliminating physical maquettes of the characters for the animators to reference. "We only used virtual maquettes," according to Manninen. "We went straight from drawings to CG models. Partly it was a choice by the schedule and partly by me. I felt the maquetting process, even though it's very creative and ambitious as far as what you can do with it, actually creates another target and I was much more comfortable going for the final target, so to speak. You want to focus your attention on how it's going to look in your actual medium, which is computer graphics. It was the first time we've done that, but it was very successful because of the talented modelers we had translating their designs from paper to CG."

Kung fu films are noted for their unbelievable martial-arts showdowns and the often physically impossible maneuvers their protagonists are capable of. Kung Fu Panda goes beyond anything those live-action movies depict -- and yet because it takes place in a fantasy realm of cartoon animals, it seems far more believable. "We had these animals," Manninen reflects, "and we wanted them to go animalistic. By going that route they had more physicality and could therefore do things we don't expect human being to do.