Kung Fu Panda 2 parent and family review

One of our all time favorite cartoon movies was Kung Fu Panda, so we were super excited to win passes to see a preview of the next one in the series Kung Fu Panda 2 (and, Yes, there will definitely be a Kung Fu Panda 3 based on how this one ends)

Our family rated it like this:
Parents  -  A-
12 year old boy  -  A
7 year old boy  -  A++

Po (Jack Black) is still the Dragon Warrior and now the head of the Furious Five (including the voices of Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogan and Lucy Liu), fighting crime and protecting people.  They are all good friends and have fun together being the leaders of Kung Fu.  Things are good for Po and friends.

Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) finds Inner Peace and teaches Po a new move that he needs inner peace to do correctly.   Po will need to master this move and find his own inner peace to meet the new challenges he will soon encounter.  New enemies in far off lands create a weapon which is more powerful than Kung Fu and they need metal to make more of these new weapons to overtake all of China.  When Po first battles these new foes he has a flashback which he cannot explain.  He goes to visit his Father at the Noodle Shop and Po begins to realize that his father may not be his real father (since he is a panda and his father is a stork).  Po now realizes that he does not have inner peace and needs to learn about who he is.  His father tells him the story of how he came to be with Po, but does not know about Po's real parents.  His journey to defeat this new (but actually an old) foe and to learn about his origins takes us through the entire movie.

Parent warnings for small children:  I can't really think of anything.  There is no bad language, a little kung fu violence, some cannons shooting things (Po gets shot at one point) and NO sex/love scenes at all.   There are some sad moments when Po is remembering his parents and what happened to them.  The only thing I thought might be "3rd grade" humorish which people might not like is a scene where the team is trying to make their way through the city incognito and choose to use a large dragon.   - video of scene - click on "Dragon"