TheLittleSongbird Review of Chop Kick Panda

Chop Kick Panda (2011 Video)

Better than The Little Panda Fighter, but that's not really a compliment

[2/10 · 9 July 2014]

Chop Kick Panda is not a good movie at all, in fact it's very bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as The Little Panda Fighter(the first Kung Fu Panda rip-off) and is also better than any of Video Brinquedo's and Spark Plug Entertainment's output put together. The animation quality is nowhere near as awful, the characters anywhere near as annoying and it doesn't make as glaring a mistake of not knowing what the target audience is, though that mistake is still made. Chop Kick Panda does have some moderately amusing one-liners, a few vibrant colours and background art that certainly flows smoother than those of The Little Panda Fighter going for it. This said, the animation quality in general is neither good or terrible, as aforementioned it has its moments, but the character designs are very lazy, there is some blockiness and some of the colours are quite flat. The soundtrack at best is forgettable, and while the characters are not as annoying the movie make the opposite mistake and makes them completely personality-less apart from the occasional spark with Bali and character development is almost non-existent. This is made even worse in that the voice actors show little signs of trying. The script and especially the story fare the worst. The script thankfully does not take a disturbingly sadistic approach that was seen with Spark Plug Entertainment's A Car's Life, which was what was meant early on in the review but it is one script that neither children or adults will take much pleasure from. The type of humour will fly over children's heads and could be seen as too crude for them, but while not as juvenile as that of Little Panda Fighter or the rest of Video Brinquedo's output adults will find the jokes here randomly structured, forced and more insultingly stupid than funny. The story is literally a carbon copy of Kung Fu Panda- like with the opening- minus the fun, charm and heart, the lack of originality would be forgivable if the story was engaging. But engaging is the last word to sum up the story, structurally it is as thin as paper and scenes are stretched to try and hide this, meaning that ideas run out and the running time despite being short actually feels too long. Plus subplots(ie. the idea to have the panda as a single dad) are shoe-horned in that are placed so clumsily that you question why they were there at all. In conclusion, a very bad movie though never reaching into abysmal territory like The Little Panda Fighter did. 2/10 Bethany Cox