LOS ANGELES -- You don't have to be a four-legged zen master to know that with age comes fewer options.
So it is with Dustin Hoffman who, at 70, lends his voice to tomorrow's computer-animated comedy Kung Fu Panda, playing a surly martial-arts mentor named Shifu.
It's a gig the Oscar winner didn't warm to at first. Or as he recalls of his reaction: " 'Oh God, I don't want to do a cartoon!' "
Still, Hoffman relented, agreeing to hear the DreamWorks team out. After all, a benefit of having limited choices is that you're more inclined to try something new -- a situation he now finds himself in more often than not.
"I'm forced to be more selective because I'm older," says the star of such classics as The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy. "The leading roles are for guys in their 20s and 30s ... At my age unless you're a signature actor, as I call them, which means you're an action star and carry a gun or you develop your own material, you're going to be delegated to supporting roles, which are fine. You start to say, 'Why can't I have that part?' and they say, 'They want someone much younger.' See, it started with 'a little younger.' "
Which isn't to suggest he is necessarily an easier sell than he used to be -- something Kung Fu Panda's creators learned during their early discussions with Hoffman.
Initially reluctant to take the part, sketches and character designs did little to assuage his concerns that the wise, gruff Shifu was merely two-dimensional.
Eventually his interest was piqued when they described the character -- a red panda, for those keeping track of the movie's menagerie -- as "a prick," Hoffman says. "So that makes anybody three dimensional. And then they said by the end he has an insight (into himself) which is by definition a third dimension."
Still, Hoffman, ever the pragmatist, hedged his bet, inspired by Mike Myers, who famously convinced the same studio to let him re-voice the original Shrek when he was displeased with his work.
"I had a gentleman's agreement with the animators that if I didn't like my performance, I could do it over again."
Satisfied, he signed on, partly in the belief he would be working with cast members including Angelina Jolie and Jack Black. Instead, Hoffman discovered just the opposite -- much to his disappointment.
"You're in a room with a microphone; you're not interacting with other actors. There was one day I got to work with Jack Black, but in my naivety, I thought we'd all be together. But (the animators) work on it like writers or painters.
"Movies, you have to get right the first time. This takes four years and longer in terms of having the idea and working on it ... I found it very hard. I wouldn't like to do it again, but I'm not going to say I wouldn't do it again. I didn't enjoy it."
That said, if the erratic workload -- a day's work and then three months later you're called back -- frustrated Hoffman, it also affirmed his appreciation for the genre's painstaking craftsmanship.
Far from the cartoons he knew as a kid, he says he now considers animation "an art-form" on par with other forms of filmmaking.
That's no small praise coming from a performer who has long cultivated a reputation as a perfectionist. For this, he offers no apologies.
"I always say, when you're on the table for brain surgery, you don't want the guy to say, 'Hey, I'm doctor so-and-so, but don't worry, I'm not a perfectionist.' "
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