In the mountains of Sichuan, China, a researcher forms a bond with Qian Qian, a panda who is about to experience nature for the first time.
As you can guess by the title, the movie “Pandas” is a documentary about the cuddly black and white Asian bears. Except the video is on a tight leash with little room to move around because of an agenda. Yes, endangered bears need a documentary to put them in the spotlight and probably not only brings awareness but also cash flow. If those are in fact the goals, the writer should have spent more time with the pandas than with the people working with the animals.
In China, there’s a lady with the nickname The Panda Mom because Hou Rong has helped over two hundred pandas thrive and now she wants to guide them back into the wild. The video spends more time introducing this dedicated woman than the incredibly adorable two-month-old bears in her care. The camera moves again but this time across the globe to Lyme, New Hampshire. A man named Ben Kilham earned the name Papa Bear for his work rescuing black bear cubs and returning them to the wild.
Panda Mom wants to work with Papa Bear to learn how to reintegrate pandas into the bamboo filled wilderness of China. They hire Jake Owens and Bi Wen Lei to help navigate the wilds with a select girl cub Qian Qian to leave her habitat and return to her roots. The rest of the short forty-minute film focuses on Jake Owen’s journey with the giant bear. He even learned Ju Jitsu to help keep on sparing ground.
Despite her size and species, Qian Qian relies on Jake for navigating skills. He is part of her life and a welcome addition since she grew up around humans. Returning to nature may have been the life of her ancestors but for her, she moves to Panda Valley, Lipizing Nature Reserve, and then finally into the actual wild. She does well until a run in with the wild gets her stuck in a tree. Jake comes to the rescue, and the bear gives life as a single bear in the woods another try.
Like I said at the beginning, the movie focuses more on the people surrounding the pandas than the bears themselves. I learned nothing about panda bears beyond their endangered status. The questions I went in with never got answered. I have no idea what the life span of a panda is, nor do I know how many cubs they birth. I already knew pandas loved bamboo and yet bamboo got screen time. By the time the movie got around to information about Pandas, the credits rolled. Hopefully, the writers will create a sequel to this truncated documentary and give us some real information about the bears themselves.
Now available to own on Digital
