Panda! Go, Panda!

• 1. Introduction

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  Panda! Go, Panda! hit Japanese theaters in 1972, weeks after the government announced China would loan a pair of giant pandas to the Ueno Zoo. The country went panda-mad. Into that moment arrived a short animated film about a girl, a panda cub, and his very large father, made by four animators who had recently walked out of Toei Animation with an ambitious plan that had just collapsed. Who were they? What plan failed? And how did a rejection letter from a Swedish author send them toward one of the most beloved animated films of the decade?

• 2. The Pippi Rejection

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  In 1971, Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki, and Yoichi Kotabe left Toei Animation to join their mentor Yasuo Otsuka at A Productions studio. Their shared goal was specific: an animated series based on Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking. They invested heavily in pre-production, then traveled to Sweden to seek Lindgren's permission in person. She refused them flatly.

  Rejected, Takahata and Miyazaki joined Otsuka on the Lupin III Part I TV series, where they functioned as the A-Pro directors team. When Lupin III was cancelled in 1972, the group returned to what remained of the Pippi work. Rather than discard it, they reworked many of its ideas and story elements into a new short film. That film became Panda Kopanda, timed to land during the panda fever that September's government announcement had triggered.

• 3. Mimiko, Panny, PapaPanda

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  Mimiko is left alone when her grandmother departs for a memorial service in Nagasaki. Returning to her house in a bamboo grove, she finds a panda cub named Panny asleep on the back doorstep. His father, PapaPanda, soon arrives, and the three form an odd family: PapaPanda becomes the father Mimiko never had, and Mimiko becomes Panny's mother.

  The arrangement draws official attention. A policeman visits to check on the unaccompanied child, panics when he sees PapaPanda, and alerts the zoo staff and the zookeeper who lost the pandas after they broke out. The dispute resolves in a practical compromise: the pandas work at the zoo during visiting hours and return to Mimiko each evening. That domestic logic, playful and warm, carried the film to success in Japanese theaters.

• 4. Rainy-Day Circus

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  Panda! Go, Panda!: The Rainy-Day Circus arrived in 1973, made by the same staff, and pushed the premise into larger chaos. A tiger cub named Tiny joins the household, his arrival structured like the Goldilocks story: Panny notices his food has been eaten and tracks the culprit down.

  A nasty storm floods most of the land around Mimiko's hometown overnight. A bottled distress message from Tiny sends the family after a stranded circus train carrying all the animals. Panny's antics inadvertently start the train moving; it heads toward the mayor's house before PapaPanda stops it. The film ends with Mimiko marching home in a line with PapaPanda and Panny, each playing brass: PapaPanda on tuba, Mimiko on French horn, and Panny on a trumpet that had been broken earlier and was somehow repaired by the finale.

  Both short films played as opening features before Toho's Godzilla films, where audiences received them warmly.

• 5. Yoshifumi Kondo

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  Yoshifumi Kondo, who also worked on Lupin III, served as a key animator on both panda films. His most noted contribution was a scene in Rainy-Day Circus: Mimiko and the pandas riding a bed across a flooded river.

  Kondo went on to work closely with Takahata and Miyazaki on Anne of Green Gables, Grave of the Fireflies, and Whisper of the Heart. The panda films gave him an early, prominent credit alongside the two directors he would follow through the next two decades of Japanese animation.

• 6. Ghibli Lineage and Home Video

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  Takahata, Miyazaki, and Kotabe followed the panda films by creating Heidi, Girl of the Alps in 1974, now regarded as a landmark anime series. Takahata and Miyazaki founded Studio Ghibli in 1985.

  In Japan, both panda films are available on the Ghibli Ga Ippai label and were included in the 2015 Blu-ray box set The Collected Works of Director Isao Takahata. Japanese releases include English subtitles. In North America, Pioneer Entertainment first released the films on DVD; Discotek Media followed and issued a Blu-ray edition in 2016. GKIDS, the current licensee, re-released both films in 2022. The connection between the panda films and Ghibli is not incidental: the creative bonds formed at A Productions in 1971 ran directly through Panda Kopanda and into the studio's founding fourteen years later.