We go for our own reality. I remember some of our guys saying it is way harder to make stylized art directed explosions of jade rather than a regular explosion of shrapnel.

If you have a movie that doesn't strive to go to a certain emotional point, you can do anything and it will be fine and funny. But if you have something pretty emotional at its core, you have to make it right. You don't want it overwrought or unearned. Everything has to be moving towards this one thing.

I think the one thing specifically that is most consistent, is that we want to harken back to martial arts movies because that's kind of the genre we're paying tribute to, so there are some similarities to a lot of films, because they all feed off each other!

I think it's because Po [from Kung Fu Panda] is such a geek, and he is so relatable. He is so excited by life and is excited to learn new things. I think that accessibility is something that we all can relate to, there are so many things we wish we could do but don't have the means to achieve it.

One of my favorite things about the Kung Fu Panda 3 is the look of it. We never go for realism. I think a lot of time when people go for 3D that's the mistake. Because we're never going for full realism - for computer generated live action films like Avatar the goal is realism, to make the audience feel like they are seeing something that is real. Lord of the Rings had character design and environments to make it look real, whereas we aren't going for that, we are going for something that is theatrically, viscerally, and emotionally real.

I think we had to push forward to make sure it was different, do something that we had never done before and yet still have the consistency to stay in the same world. This was our chance to do all the things we didn't get a chance to do before. We've been working on these movies [Kung Fu Panda] for twelve years and we have to keep things exciting for us in order for us to devote that many years of our lives to do this.

As I said, i'm very quiet, i don't go around saying "I'm awesome!" but when I brought in my portfolio into DreamWorks and showed them what I could do, my art style is a lot wilder than I am.