Look at that face!
Get a giant dose of cuteness with IMAX Pandas.
Stock up on bamboo: Fluffy fur balls are about to take over the box office. On Friday, the IMAX documentary
Pandas hits theaters, the product of three years of film crews following a panda named Qian Qian. The film traces the feisty cub’s journey from birth as scientists pilot a program to raise and release endangered pandas into the wild.
“This movie feels good! And the world is in need of more things that feel good,” says Kristen Bell, a long-time animal advocate who narrates the 43minute documentary.
Pandas takes viewers around the world, from the China’s Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, where Qian Qian is born, to the mountains of New Hampshire, where selftaught bear expert Ben Kilham raises orphaned black bear cubs. Many of his fostered bears, more than 160 in all, remember Kilham even in adulthood, when they’re living in the wild.
As Kilham teaches the Chinese scientists (led by “Panda mom” Hou Rong) his methods of bonding with the bears before careful release, a hefty dose of cuteness abounds. Cameras follow a class of baby pandas as they learn to crawl, tumble down slides and feed themselves with, yes, giant bottles.
The Pandas crew made sure to remain professional in the face of such adorableness. “We’re definitely not allowed to pick them up, but if they crawl up on you, which sometimes they would do, what can you do?” laughs Drew Fellman, who directed the film with David Douglas. “They’re incredibly curi- ous at that age. They would climb up on us and bite our ears.”
Still, the message behind the kidfriendly documentary resonates: With deforestation slashing the number of safe, bamboo-rich nature reserves for pandas, (the lackadaisical giant pandas’ chief diet), today there remain just
2,000 pandas in the wild and roughly
300 in captivity.
“The only real threat that pandas face is loss of habitat,” says Fellman, noting the danger of extinction, referencing recent news of the death of the world’s last male northern white rhino. “Certainly the hardest part about (filming) pandas is how few of them there are.”
His IMAX crew follows Qian Qian during her gradual release into the wild, including a harrowing search and rescue after the young bear was attacked and lay weak high in a tree. “Our hearts were just pounding,” says Fellman.
Today, Qian Qian is in a Chinese panda reserve, preparing to go fully wild again. Thanks to pioneering programs like Chengdu Panda Base, “it’s never too late to change the world in a positive way,” says the director.
Bell’s pressing panda takeaway? “I was sad to really understand that humans are a greater threat to panda than any of their natural predators,” says The Good Place star. “They’re so chill. They are the antithesis of a grizzly bear. They just want to hang out and eat. That’s kind of my mantra in life: Just hang out and snack.”
“I was sad to really understand that humans are a greater threat to panda than any of their natural predators.”
Kristen Bell