Po pile! Courtesy of DreamWorks Animation.

The original Kung Fu Panda came as a pleasant surprise. Jack Black’s carb-pounding panda, Po, with his body-image issues and dreams of Enter the Dragon heroics, added a touching pathos to the sarcastic-talking-animal genre. Po’s transformation into a kung-fu ass-kicker had all the inspirational uplift and acrobatic visual dazzle of a Biggest Loser finale choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping. However, when we read that Charlie Kaufman, Hollywood’s premier self-reflexive writer, had done rewrites on Kung Fu Panda 2, we rushed to our laptop to pre-order tickets—and realized we had a year to wait.Identifying any individual voice in the chop suey of re-re-rewritten scripts may be a fool’s errand, but guessing which jokes may have come from Charlie Kaufman’s sui generis imagination would sure make one hell of a drinking game. Now a year later, with Kung Fu Panda 2 in theaters this holiday weekend, we can bust out the 3-D shot glasses.

So which jokes did Charlie pen? Well, there aren’t multiple Malkovich cameos, Po doesn’t consult Robert McKee for screenwriting advice/kung-fu pointers, and he doesn’t hire Tom Wilkinson to erase the memory of an orange-haired pandette (voiced by Kate Winslet). However, the sequel’s plot is powered by Po’s struggles with self-doubt and search for inner peace after he learns he’s adopted. A piece of inspiration fresh off Kaufman’s yoga mat, perhaps? Also, Po carries around self-reflexive action figures of him and his Furious Five cohorts on his quest to stop an evil, self-loathing peacock named Shen. Was this Kaufman’s own sublimated desire for a lucrative Hasbro tie-in for his next meta-movie? And the action set pieces where Po storms the maze-like Gongmen city and its octagonal tower did feel labyrinthine—in a very Kaufman way. Finally, there came a scene that just had to be Charlie Kaufman: in a dream, Po’s lost parents say they gave him up for adoption because they didn’t love him; in his place, they’ve taken a radish as their child. The radish then proceeds to wipe the floor with Po, kung-fu style.

If a kung-fu fight with produce isn’t Kaufman—or at least Kaufman-inspired—we don’t know what is.