Kung Fu Panda

Released June 6, 2008 and directed by John Stevenson and Mark Osborne, Kung Fu Panda dropped Jack Black's kung fu superfan Po into the middle of his own favorite legend: chosen as the Dragon Warrior in front of the Furious Five he idolizes, trained by a despairing Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), and pointed at the escaped snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane). The voice cast was absurdly deep — Angelina Jolie's Tigress, Jackie Chan's Monkey, Lucy Liu's Viper, Seth Rogen's Mantis, David Cross's Crane, and Randall Duk Kim's turtle sage Oogway.

Everyone expecting a feature-length fat-panda joke got something else: a genuinely gorgeous martial-arts movie that treated kung fu cinema with obvious love, punchlines included. It earned about $632 million worldwide on a $130 million budget — the highest-grossing animated film of 2008 — swept the Annie Awards with ten wins including Best Animated Feature, and picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, losing to WALL-E.

Po became a franchise pillar: sequels in 2011, 2016, and 2024, and a permanent place in the DreamWorks pantheon alongside Shrek. For kids of the late 2000s, the original is the one — inner peace, the secret ingredient soup, and the single best use of 'skadoosh' in cinema history.