The animators took a six-hour kung fu class to get an idea of the movie's action.
Dustin Hoffman's contract included a stipulation which allowed him to do additional voice recording sessions without hindrance, should he be unsatisfied with his performance. Beyond the contract, Hoffman also tutored Jack Black on his performance in the nighttime stairway argument scene.
The individual fighting styles of the Furious Five members (Crane, Mantis, Tiger, Monkey, and Viper) are actual Kung Fu styles modelled after the particular animals. Po's fighting style is modelled after bear-style Kung Fu.
To get the ambiance of the movie, production designer Raymond Zibach and art director Heng Tang spent several years researching Chinese art and Kung Fu movies. This effort, combined with the rest of the crew's extensive research and knowledge of Chinese culture, so impressed the Chinese that there were meetings by official government cultural bodies to discuss why their own country has not produced animated movies of such quality themselves.
The film was originally going to be a spoof of the Kung Fu genre, but one of the directors, John Stevenson, wanted to have a blend of comedy and action to make this movie more epic, saying, "I wasn't interested in making fun of martial arts movies, because I really think they can be great films. They can be as good as any genre movie when they're done properly."