If you do not feel like watching a good animated film like Kung-Fu Panda and want to watch a poorly made knock off, then I have the movie for you. The Little Panda Fighter is the worst animated film that I have ever watched. I thought a previous entry into this Ode to Bad Reels column, Foodfight, held that title but after sitting through this monstrosity, Foodfight does not seem that bad anymore. The Little Panda Fighter is filled with lazy animation, horrible voice acting and a story that is not worth getting invested in at all.
The story follows our main character, Pancada, who works at a boxing club. The main conflict of the movie is that the boxing club is losing money due to their top fighter, Freak Teddy, constantly defeating everyone and causing the audience to be bored. I would argue that perhaps they are losing money because their boxing club is located in the middle of nowhere but I am not the one who wrote this movie. So the owner of the club and Pancada’s boss, a polar bear named Polaris, comes up with the idea to fight Freak Teddy himself while wearing a disguise. He gives the disguise to Pancada so he can wash it but he ends up shrinking it in the process. This leads to Polaris having to wear a black shirt that was way too small and a mask which according to the movie made him look like a panda instead of a polar bear.
We find out at this time that Pancada does not have dreams of becoming a fighter but rather he wants to become a dancer. At the same time that Polaris fights Freak Teddy and loses, Pancada is at a dance compitition and actually wins. Somehow after those events are done, people mistake the disguised Polaris for Pancada and for an unexplained reason he has to now fight Freak Teddy as well. One would think that at this point we would get a heroic victory for a happy ending but that would be a wrong prediction. Pancada proceeds to get his ass whooped by Freak Teddy. After the fight Pancada goes to see Polaris expecting him to be upset or disappointed but instead he is overjoyed because apparently he has so little faith in Pancada that he bet against him and is now the richest bear in the city. He gives the boxing club to his assistant and he turns it into a dance club with Pancada while Polaris goes off to the North Pole and the movie ends.
This movie was too short, being only 51 minutes, that it was hard to get a favorite scene. The whole story of The Little Panda Fighter is just a mess from beginning to end, which left me scratching my head from scene to scene. The ending just tied all the non-sense up with a nice little bow on top. After giving up his dream and doing all that training to fight just to ultimately lose at the end while his boss still gets what he wants, feels like a huge waste of time. The movie should give you a message but with The Little Panda Fighter, the message just seems to be that no matter what you give or how hard you work it might not be good enough and someone will still profit out of your failure.
For The Little Panda Fighter, I would skip this movie entirely and just watch Kung-Fu Panda. This movie is filled with horrible animation, really bad voice acting and a story that leads nowhere and leaves you feeling like you just wasted an hour of your life. If you do feel like subjecting yourself to such disappointment then check out the trail for The Little Panda Fighter below.
