Panda Bear in Africa (2024)

Interesting facts

Panda Bear in Africa is a 2024 animated adventure film directed by Richard Claus and Karsten Kiilerich with story by Claus, Kiierich and Rob Sprackling. The film is an international co-production between Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Estonia and it follows a panda cub who travels to Africa in order to rescue his dragon friend who has been kidnapped. The film was first released in Germany at the European Film Market during a screening at CinemaxX in Berlin on February 15, then on August 7 in France and October 16 in the Netherlands.

Production

The film´s history begins from Richard Claus and his Kenyan wife that told a bedtime story involving African animals to the couple´s 6-years old daughter. The directors described the pitch as a creative cross between The Lion King, Kung Fu Panda, and The Jungle Book. It subverts the traditional "hero's journey" by taking a native Asian animal and dropping him completely out of his comfort zone into a vibrant, unfamiliar African ecosystem.

While most of the film´s production is done in the Netherlands (especially at Katuni and Cool Beans´s studios in Amsterdam), Denmark handled storyboarding, character design layout, pre-production editing, and major 3D character animation blocks. Germany handled production pipelines, visual effects asset coordination, France post-production pipeline and financing. As well Estonia handling parts of the movie animation at the local A.

To capture both global marketability and localized authenticity, the voice acting production was masterfully split between Dutch actors of Chinese descent (for the Asian animals) and native South African talent (for the African animals).

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