Deftly pandas to its audience

It wouldn’t be right to say that, half an hour after “Kung Fu Panda 2” ended, I was starving for laughs again. In truth, I was starving pretty much all the way through. A lot of this movie is like an oxygen dumpling.

But Po and friends redeem themselves with a terrific third act, the animation (in three distinct styles) is superb and there’s enough hiii-YA-ing to keep the kids yipping throughout. As you exit the theater, be prepared to protect vital organs from low-altitude karate chops that slice the air at about waist height.

The many pleasures of the first film included Jack Black’s buzzing nonstop jive as Po and the way his blubbery loser gradually became a Dragon Warrior. Now the character is as fuzzy as Po’s belly: Half the time he’s kicking butt, the other half he’s falling on it. Moreover, now that every “SportsCenter” host, celebrity gossip and hepcat blogger rattles his vocal cords in fluent Blacktalk (“That’s severely cool,” “Taste the defeat,” “My fist hungers for justice”), it’s all starting to take on the air of a Tuesday night lounge act. In Reno. Predictable comedy is dead comedy — and no, you don’t get a pass because half your audience is still mastering long division. Rug-rat chaperones are being asked to pay up to $17 for this in Manhattan. Them is grown-up prices.

Still, the quality of the animation is worth it. In a prologue presented beautifully to look like paper cutouts, we meet the villainous peacock Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), who as a youngster was banished by his parents because of his obsession with finding the dark side of fireworks. This element, together with a sequence in which Po learns about finding inner peace from his Yoda-like master, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), by mastering the ability to catch a single raindrop, is essential to setting up the not unrousing big finish.

Po wants to learn a little more about where he came from. Just as a for-instance — why is Dad a goose? Father explains that Po is indeed adopted, having been discovered in a crate of radishes, but that’s all he knows. Po is as hungry for more answers as he is for noodles.

Meanwhile, Lord Shen and his army of wolves are ransacking a town. Po and his five pals (including Angelina Jolie’s Tigress and Seth Rogen’s Mantis) come to the rescue, although every few minutes it’s Po who needs to be saved, usually by Crane picking him up as he plummets into a gorge. Kung Fu Panda was an advanced warrior at the end of the first film, but now he’s bumbling again because, well, making fatty fall down is this movie’s primary sense of comedy.

It’s a bit hard to be terrified of a peacock (the snow leopard in the first movie was way more sinister). But the animators are in charge, and they succeed in dazzling with Lord Shen’s look — just as they create a sly hand-drawn style for flashbacks of Po’s youth. Action scenes such as a battle in a towering pagoda look splendid.

Shen lacks size but does have heavy artillery. He’s been stealing all of the metal from the villages to produce a cannon with which he proposes to rule all of China. (Silly bird: If he just made cheap junk he could rule the world, not just China.)

The pattern on Shen’s tail feathers breaks loose a memory Po has about how he was parted from his parents as a cub. He comes to suspect that he was abandoned. If so, Shen and Po have much in common. The script could have done more with this idea: Shen might have tricked Po into joining forces, if for no other reason than to split the cost of a therapist to sort out their daddy issues.

At the end of that nifty third act, there is a warm emotional payoff that comes with a slightly alarming quantity of hugging. (Young cubs, listen well: Bugs Bunny never hugged anyone unless he had a lit stick of dynamite in one hand.) One worthy thing about Po, though: He is not faux. In his bounce and jiggle he contains the toddler’s absence of self-consciousness, the puppy’s anticipation of infinite joy, Chris Farley’s denial of limits. And unlike Farley, KFP can go on forever. As long as he doesn’t overdose on bamboo.