How hard is it to maintain a life of awesomeness? It’s not as simple as one particular panda skilled in the martial arts would like. In Kung Fu Panda 2, the follow-up to Dreamworks Animation’s 2008 hit, Jack Black returns as the voice of Po, the clownish panda with a laid-back vibe who becomes the Dragon Warrior, keeping order in the Valley of Peace with help from his fellow kung fu masters, the Furious Five. But when a villainous peacock, Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), emerges with a weapon that will aid him in taking over not just the valley but all of China and put an end to kung fu, Po and the Furious Five must figure out a way to defeat this dangerous fowl.

With their main character journeying far beyond his comfort zone, the filmmakers sought to show new areas of the country in their design, even travelling to different sites in China to understand the landscape better.

“Because it is a sequel, we had to push the world into a much vaster scale and give people more exotic locations than there were in the first film,” said the director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson. “We were able to walk around and feel the tactility of the subtle details, like the mist, the light, the play of the colour on the rock and the complex tones that came through.”

The production designer, Raymond Zibach, who also designed the first Panda, and his team built an environment (computer animated in 3-D) that presented new challenges for Po and his friends. Below is a look at some of the paintings and sketches, with commentary from Zibach.

Musicians village

For the first battle sequence, in which wolf bandits attack a village on the outskirts of the valley, the designers created a cliffhanger of a location. They wanted a place up high to give a sense of the film’s higher stakes. The look of the village in this sketch by the art director, Tang Kheng Heng, came from the filmmakers’ trip to a district of Chengdu. They took cues from the architecture there and included details like moss growing on structures. “This is definitely more cliff-like than where we were, but the buildings and how the trees work with them was inspired by that visit,” Zibach said. “With a lot of early drawings and paintings we’re thinking: What is the big compositional idea? And here, it’s that sliver of light blue that takes your eye to where this little town is.”

Gongmen City

One of the locations prominently featured is Gongmen City, where Lord Shen has taken over the palace in the city’s centre. His tower can be seen in the background of this early sketch. To find inspiration for the design of Gongmen City the filmmakers travelled to the walled city of Pingyao, the former banking capital of China.

“The impressiveness of the architecture in China comes from how much it defies the landscape and juts out,” Zibach said. This design was created when the story was in its early stages, with the billowing smoke and hazy backgrounds setting the mood for a city that was more menacing than welcoming. In the final version, it was Lord Shen who became the menace, rather than the city itself.

Lord Shen’s Chambers

Inside this octagonal room in Lord Shen’s tower “we were trying to find a way to create a space for the peacock and basically have a throne but not be literal to a human throne,” Zibach said. He initially conceived of a giant flame rock as the villain’s backdrop because his weapon of destruction shoots fire and metal.

“In Chinese culture they use these sculpted rocks as a sign of reward called scholar’s rocks. And that’s what this was kind of inspired by. It would be a symbol of his intellect and a symbol of power at the same time.” The designers also wanted to reinforce the centralised, symmetrical nature of Lord Shen’s locations, in contrast to Po’s asymmetrical environments, which emphasise his lack of structure as an individual.

The final Battle

A fight sequence at the end pits Po against Lord Shen. This design bathes the background in a perilous red. “We didn’t use red as a bad element in the first film,” Zibach said. “It was used for kung fu power or joy. And in this one, peacock takes that colour theme on and really has a little more of an intense evil connotation.”

That goes for his wolf henchmen too and the torches lighting the scene. Zibach decided to use that theme and match it against Po’s cool-headedness in an ultimate battle of fire vs water, with the hero positioned in a harbour fighting off Lord Shen’s fireballs. “We didn’t want to be totally literal,” Zibach explained.