One Year Later, The Pandas Are Doing Okay
(Photo by Getty Images)
Last week was the one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake on May 12, 2008, that destroyed the Wolong Panda sanctuary in the Sichuan province of China. The surviving pandas were sent to other sanctuaries around the country, and eight of the pandas had an extended stay at the Beijing zoo over the summer.
Most have now moved to their new luxurious sanctuary in Bi Feng Xia. Jennifer Keating from the San Diego zoo took a trip to China and reports that the dedicated keepers and adorable animals are all recovering nicely and adapting well to their new location.
While reading about the status, I stumbled across news of a movie that was being filmed at Wolong when the 8.0 earthquake struck. The Disney film is the story of an orphan boy who finds a lost panda cub, and helps the cub find his mother. The surprising thing is that they used real pandas -- not animated -- to tell the story.
The Chinese filmmakers had the cooperation of the Wolong research center, but they were only allowed to film each panda for 90 minutes a day. And even then, they had to get lucky and hope the panda just naturally wanted to sleep, or play, or do whatever was called for in the script, because they weren't allowed to train, prod, or otherwise "forcefully" motivate the cubs.
One way they managed was to use six different cubs to play Pang Pang (which means "Chubby" in Chinese) the star of the film. They also adapted the script along the way. But tragedy almost shut down the movie before they finished, when the earthquake hit just days before they wrapped filming.
Twenty-eight crew members were stranded in the mountains and had to hike for three days until they were rescued by the Chinese military. And sadly, Mao Mao, the panda who played Pang Pang's mother, was one of the pandas killed in the earthquake.
The filmmakers persevered, and on May 8th this year, almost one year to the date, they released "Trail of the Panda" in China. If it does well in there, Disney plans to redub it and distribute it around the world. Since pandas are so irresistible, that probably means we'll see it in time for the holidays!
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