Movie Thoughts: Panda Bear in Africa (2024)

• Released: February 15th, 2024
• Directed by: Richard Claus, Karsten Kiilerich
• Running time: 1h 24min
• Rating: 3/5

Synopsis

A young giant panda named Pang travels to Africa to save his best friend, the dragon Jielong, as the lions want to use her as a weapon against the hyenas.

My Thoughts

Well, that certainly is a...literal title. Nothing wrong with that, but it is very on the nose.

Ah well, the movie itself? Pretty solid. Nothing great, but also nothing bad. I liked this for what it was, a simple, mostly-lighthearted family film. It's got some fun characters, nice character designs and animation, and a good message of helping each other overcome differences and such.

I've seen some people in reviews say that this movie rips off The Lion King or Kung Fu Panda, but honestly, no I don't agree. Yes, it does reference these movies, but it has its own unique story and characters and never really falls directly into ripoff territory to me. At most there's a few quick references to the aforementioned movies (like Pang sometimes using his pinky claw, or the evil uncle lion holding up Ade like he is Simba.) But I don't think that briefly referencing something is the same as ripping things off, especially when the story and characters are totally different from the movies it's said to be ripping off.

Where I do have a criticism, it is that the movie never really explains how exactly the African animals are aware of Jielong in particular. Like, it seems they specifically set out to kidnap her for the lion kingdom, but how exactly they are aware of her existence is never brought up. And even if they knew of her existence, they still don't seem to know that her powers aren't fully developed yet, so it just kinda feels weird that they have this very particular and spotty information regarding her. Dragons are said to be rare creatures, but how in particular they know exactly where to find Jielong (and her in particular) is never really brought up.

Speaking of Jielong, her design in the movie is also the only one I didn't really vibe with. She overall looks fine, but for whatever her lower jaw is like, unnaturally flat and thin, and her teeth are super tiny, making some of the lip sync on her look a bit weird, particularly on the O-sounds where her lips sometimes seem to go lower than her actual jaw. She isn't a terrible design or anything, but her mouth was constantly distracting me.

What I did really like in this movie, though, was how the conflict between the lions and hyenas was portrayed. At first I was afraid it was going to fall into the "lions good, hyenas bad" trapping quite a few animated media with African settings fall into, but thankfully that never happened. There are good and bad lions, and the hyenas aren't evil, either. And in the end they befriend one another and share the land. I particularly like Ade and Niala as characters, their friendship was pretty sweet and it was nice to see them reunite their kingdoms like this.

The villains are honestly not this movie's strong suit. The evil uncle lion (honestly I forgot his name) is just a pretty standard antagonist. And no, he's not a Scar ripoff, despite falling in the similar "evil uncle who happens to be a lion" trope. He's his own kind of antagonist, but not a particularly well-written one. Just a kind of one-note villain. There's also a group of side villains in this ostrich and kudu who capture animals to work for them, but they're just kind of side characters who don't do that much. The only villain in this I kinda liked was this sassy baboon character, she was pretty fun sometimes. But yeah, the evildoers aren't this movie's strong suit.

But the rest of the characters are pretty solid. Jojo the monkey can get annoying, but honestly his arc is still pretty sweet and I never really hated him or anything. The friendship between Jielong and Pang is also very nice, similar to the one between Niala and Ade. I don't know, these were just pretty likable and charming main characters to me and I like how they were handled. They're not, like, amazing, or anything, but they're pretty decent. 

So yeah, not a great movie, but also not bad. Don't go in with high expectations (it is still a pretty simple family film, after all), but it is just a solid movie and I had a pretty fun time watching it.