Angelina Jolie unleashes her tigress at Cannes

CANNES, France She walks into the room wearing a simple taupe dress clinched with a brown belt. On her right forefinger is a ring with an enormous square green stone and on her left shoulder is an elaborate tattoo, lines of numbers that give the longitude and latitude of the birthplaces of her six children and her partner, Brad Pitt. Angelina Jolie looks both elegant and tough, just like the characters in her best known films: the sexy secret agents in The Tourist and Salt, the sly assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the kick-ass heroine of the Lara Croft films.

She's a tigress in heels, so it's not much of a surprise when she says that Tigress the martial arts expert in the animated Kung Fu Panda films is "one of the best characters I've ever played."

"I've always been drawn to strong characters and I admire strong women, emotionally and physically, who are fighting for something. I have a sense of justice and injustice. It's always been more than just trying to be tough."

Tigress gets to show her softer side in Kung Fu Panda 2, the sequel that is being promoted in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival. It has drawn a roomful of reporters who spent the morning watching the fraught family drama We Need to Talk About Kevin a drama about a troubled teenager involved in a high school massacre and then scuttled down the Croisette for a news conference about a roly-poly bear fighting for what's right in ancient China.

Jolie was the main attraction, although she shared the stage with two other celebrity voices: Dustin Hoffman, who returns as Shifu, the wise old master, and Jack Black who stars as Po, the panda with a big appetite for junk food and an even bigger one for vanquishing enemies.

All three presented elements of their animated characters. Hoffman, for instance wearing a dark suit and running shoes was the voice of maturity, "the oldest person in the room," in his estimation. Asked how it felt to be known as an animated red panda after his Oscar-winning perfor! mances i n a lifetime of dramas, he replied, "It's a fitting end to a long and distinguished career." Black, a jokester in a black T-shirt and jeans, was asked about his own childhood heroes, and he replied that it was Bobby McFerrin in his days as a jazz singer, before Don't Worry, Be Happy. "He can sing while he's breathing in," Black instructed the assembly, and launched into an impromptu imitation of McFerrin singing Blackbird.

But Jolie drew the paparazzi and most of the questions, partly because of accumulated star power of Brangelina Pitt is in Cannes as well, to promote the festival entry Tree of Life but also because Kung Fu Panda 2 seems at least partially tailored to her life story.

"We're really growing up with Po and learning about different aspects of human nature," she said. "In the first one, it was that you can be anything you want, no matter what you look like, feel like or where you come from . . . in this one it was very much about family, and no matter what you've gone through in your youth, you can be what you choose to be in life."

In Kung Fu Panda 2, Po the panda discovers that the goose who raised him isn't his real father "it was the elephant in the room in the first one," Black acknowledged, mixing his metaphors slightly and he sets off to find the story of his natural parents.

Adoption, of course, is part of the Brangelina legend: Jolie and Pitt have six children, three of them adopted. Jolie said she took them to see the movie as a kind of informal test audience. Unsurprisingly, they loved it.

"I wondered whether they'd ask me questions about it, but (they didn't) because 'adoption' and 'orphanage' and 'birth mother,' in our home, these are happy words. They're very used to these discussions and they were just that much more proud that they were a little more like Po."

There are other themes in the film, such as the search for inner peace, but as Hoffman said, "I didn't think inner peace existed at the Cannes Film Festival." That was proven as t! he actor s had to finesse a few tangents; for instance, Jolie declined to comment on the death of Osama bin Laden in the context of a Kung Fu Panda 2 news conference.

She did acknowledge she would love to work in China and announced that, professionally, "I'm available. I'm unemployed at the moment."

But Tigress could turn into a life's work: There are plans for more Kung Fu Panda sequels, perhaps as many as six in all, and while Jolie made no commitment, she sounded ready to give voice to the female action hero.

"When I first saw the character I didn't know if she was a boy or a girl or if I wanted to play her, whoever she was. And I was very excited that she was a girl. I think it was great for my daughters and me. We talked a lot about the fact that Po, for a male character, has a lot of sensitivity and emotion. And it seems like a very nice balance that she's the harder one, who needs to be a little bit more emotional."

jstone@postmedia.com

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