Trail of the Panda tells the story of Xiolu, a boy who, on losing his parents in a fire, becomes mute. He lives in the forest with an old man, Chen. Their peaceful life is disrupted when a scientist from the city arrives and hires Chen to help him catch a panda cub for scientific study. The cub manages to escape but is injured. Kind-hearted Xiolu tries to protect the young animal and becomes best friends with it – the friendship overcomes his own trauma and opens his heart again as he manages to return the cub to the wild and its mother.

This is the first feature made with support of Sichuan’s Wolong Giant Panda Reserve and is shot deep in the forest where child actor Daichi Harashima is able to interact fully with the pandas. Shooting was completed a few months before the Sichuan earthquake in which the film’s mother panda lost her life. The film, like a National Geographic programme with added drama (a very weak plot, though), affords the audience the opportunity to experience pandas up-close and personally. In that sense it is thoroughly engaging – a mere blink of the panda cub’s eyes had females in the audience cooing, though no scene between the boy and the cub is particularly memorable.

Being a Disney film, it misses opportunities to dig into issues it mentions briefly, like the destruction of wildlife through overdevelopment (the scientist confesses to probably using the wrong way to find pandas); ignorance about environmental protection in poor rural districts (Chen begs the scientist to hire him again if he needs animals); and the relationship between humans and animals (Xiolu constantly treats the cub more like a pet than an animal of equal status – which also makes their relationship less moving). Rachel Mok