Granny (voice of Reiko Seno) is off to Nagasaki for her husband’s memorial service. It seems like there are questions we can ask about that, but they’re not for here, neither the film nor this write up. Being a terrible legal guardian, she leaves her obviously single digit aged granddaughter Mimiko (v/o Kazuko Sugiyama) at home on her own because of school or something, which is one of those set ups that happens a lot in anime, though usually the child is at least a teenager. To be fair, she does seem to have her doubts about doing this before Mimiko shoves her and her bag onto the train and packs her off to the far end of the country. Still, that’s by the by. This is one of those implausible communities where everyone knows everyone else and the whole community is willing to look out for the little girl. Mimiko and presumably her grandmother live in a house in a bamboo grove on the outskirts of town, and on her way back from the station she finds outside the house a little baby panda (v/o Yoshiko Ohta†). She invites him in for a drink, as you do, and it’s not long before daddy panda (v/o Kazuo Kamura) shows up. He’s grateful that she’s taken good care of his son, but upon realising she hasn’t one of her own offers to be her daddy too. She agrees to it, high jinks ensue.

So, we’re doing something different. This is actually a pair of short films. While the most common release, in the UK at any rate, runs them together with only a single opening and closing credits bookending the whole shebang, unlike a lot of such things it doesn’t seem to have any real pretentions about them not being separate entities; rather than just launching into the sequel with no fanfare, it throws up a ‘the end’ card as the first one ends and a title card for the second immediately after. This all seems like a weird way to do it. It seems like the reasonable thing to do would be to run them straight together or, preferably, keep them fully separate rather than this not-quite-either thing.

Oh, well, anyway… Panda! Go, Panda! is perhaps best remembered for being the brainchild of Hayao Miyazaki and for being a borderline dry run of his later My Neighbour Totoro (1988), kinda, sort of. I mean, the similarities are pretty obvious, from the concept at its most basic to the actual design of Papa Panda, however it doesn’t have the same sort of complexity of themes of the later film. Nor indeed did these films’ success seem to translate into getting Totoro made. Given its classic status, it’s perhaps easy to forget that no potential investors wanted to touch it with a bargepole and that it was a box office failure.‡ Mind you, it’s also actually directed by the other future big cheese at Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata. The sort of whimsy on offer feels perhaps inevitably like the midway point between the two directors’ styles, though given the running time(s), there isn’t much room for much beyond said whimsy.

The second short, Rainy Day Circus, perhaps fares a little better than the original short, with a greater degree of conflict to the story rather than being, in essence, a series of largely unconnected vignettes. It’s still mostly froth, mind you. There’s a set up involving a runaway tiger cub (v/o Yoshiko Ohta) from the circus turning up at the house and people from the circus trying to recapture it. It’s all a lot more confident in its storytelling than its predecessor and has a more concrete structure, but it never really develops the themes that it appears to introduce. If you think it’s going to run with the idea of protecting the animals from the circus… it, er, doesn’t really. It wavers back and forth on whether or not the circus is bad, seemingly settling on it being fine, glossing over evidence to the contrary. That’s not me editorialising on the ethicality of circuses; it really does occasionally allude to the circus is kind of shitty only to quickly sweep it back under the rug. I suppose that it even begins to consider this is worth something, but that it’s so quick to ignore problems that it is seemingly aware of is somewhat troubling. It does perhaps presage where Takahata’s and Miyazaki’s work would go thematically in the future,* as well as where they would go artistically; the flooded town and the train sequences are quite beautifully rendered and delightfully executed (and Miyazaki frankly self-plagiarises by recycling much of them in Spirited Away (2001)). 

The two shorts, the second in particular, are hard to dispute the historic importance of, but at the same time there’s a frothy inconsequentiality to them. It’s not totally vapid; there’s some nice stuff about found family and that, but it never really stops to consider it (or anything else) too much. They are essentially candy floss; sweet and appealing, but insubstantial. While it would be easy to say that that’s simply because they’re shorts, they don’t really have time to go beyond the surface, that seems like it’s doing short films as a very concept a disservice. That’s obviously not to say that the Panda! Go, Panda! films are bad, quite the opposite, as they’re some high-quality children’s fare, but they don’t really want to be anything beyond that. Again, that’s not necessarily a problem, but if you’re expecting something other than a pair of charming but slight 35-ish minutes given the pedigree (and the considerable prominence it tends to get in discourse as a result)… well… you might be disappointed. 

† While Yoshiko Ohta voices Baby Panda in the first short, he’s recast with Hiroko Maruyama in the second. This seems particularly strange, as Ohta is still in the cast of the second film playing a different character. She’s actually doesn’t seem to be the only cast member who returns but doesn’t reprise their (returning) character either. It’s rather odd.

‡ You occasionally see this blamed on it being released as a double feature with Grave of the Fireflies (2008), though a lot of things suggest that the latter film was deemed the easier sell, not least because the source material was a standard part of the educational syllabus and so was bound to get at least some of that audience.

* Well, I suppose Takahata had already gone in that direction; his film debut, Hols, Prince of the Sun (1968), doubled, not entirely subtly, as an allegory for the importance of unionisation and that. The studio was not pleased.