PANDA-MONIUM!
Imax documentary has just the right balance of education and adorableness
Vile, heartless and devoid of either thought or emotion. Sorry — I still had a few things to say about Pacific Rim Uprising.
And now on to Pandas, the latest large-screen doc, which is just about everything you could hope for in a cute-umentary.
Co-directors David Douglas and Drew Fellman provide the perfect mix of science and adorableness, as we learn that the giant panda is both the oldest species of bear and the most endangered, with only about 2,000 left in the wild.
The film visits the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in central China, where the big bears are bred in captivity, and where scientist Hou
Rong hopes to start releasing her charges into the wild.
Enter Ben Kilham, who has 20 years of experience raising and releasing orphaned black bear cubs in New Hampshire.
His first success, a 22-year-old female named Squirty, has since raised 11 sets of cubs.
Together, they devise a method for setting free captive-born pandas after guiding them from infancy through adulthood. (Conservation workers take jujitsu lessons to help them better handle the playful giants.)
The movie focuses on one beast, a female named Qian Qian. Her progress is backed by a score from Mark Mothersbaugh, narration by Kristen Bell and a few note-perfect tunes including the Ramones’ Do You Wanna Dance and ZZ Top’s Sharp Dressed Man.
You couldn’t ask for more from anImaxmovie.
It’s a kid-friendly 40 minutes and features numerous shots of cuddly panda cubs poking at the camera, and occasionally falling from low perches; the noise they make when they land suggests they are born with squeaky-toy noisemakers inside them.
There’s thankfully little anthropomorphizing of the animals; I still have flashbacks to Tim Allen’s simpering narration from the 2012 doc Chimpanzee. Best of all, it ends on a note of hope that rings true.
Pandas may be endangered, but the scientists in this film make it clear that nothing bad will happen to the species on their watch.