Yes, it's another slacker-with-a-dream story, and parts of it are a bit familiar, but the animation is gorgeous and the voice cast performs with great wit, carrying you through the weaker moments.
Our hero is Po (voiced by Jack Black), a roly-poly (even by panda standards) goofoff who dreams of being a warrior and is eager to see the festivities at the Jade Temple. Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) is about to select the Dragon Warrior, whose responsibility it will be to defend the valley against the evil snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane), who has recently escaped from prison.
Oogway's protege, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), fully expects that the Dragon Warrior will be one of his students, an all-star team of warriors known as the Furious Five (voiced by an all-star lineup of Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen, David Cross, and Jackie Chan), and is dumbfounded when Oogway selects Po. But "there are no accidents," says Oogway, and Shifu reluctantly set out to train Po for the task ahead.
You know the rest of the story -- Po struggles, Shifu does assorted slow burns, Po finds his inner warrior and saves the day -- but it's executed with lively charm and terrific humor. A training sequence involving a dumpling is a marvel of comic timing, and the final showdown between Po and Tai Lung is a spectacular battle that would feel at home in a live-action kung fu flick; I especially liked the way it acknowledged Po's clumsiness and worked his blunders into the sequence of events. The fact that so many martial arts films now bend the laws of gravity and physics has the effect of making the battle sequences feel like the most realistic bits of animation in the movie.
The movie looks marvelous, with (of course) strong Asian influences in the style; an opening dream sequence is particularly impressive, done in a style reminiscent of the TV series Samurai Jack, and having the feel of animated woodblock cuttings. The celebrity voices aren't distracting, as they sometimes can be; you might not even recognize most of them until you see their names in the closing credits.
You won't miss much, I suppose, if you wait to see this on cable or DVD, but it's worth a trip to the theater, especially if you've got kids; they'll love it.
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