Boonie Bears
Future Reborn
(Xiong Chu Mo
Chong Qi Wei Lai,
熊出没·重启未来)

Directors – Lin Yongchang, Qu Caijia – 2025 – China – Cert. PG – 107m

**

Park Ranger Vick unwittingly releases pink spores into the atmosphere, reducing the earth to a toxic wasteland, then he and the bears time travel forward 100 years to sort it out– in a dubbed format for family audiences – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 18th

One hundred years in the future, cities (and a cute rabbit that gets less than a minute of screen time) have been subsumed by toxic spores. This is because of one man. Flashback into the present and Park Ranger Vick (voice in the English language dub: Chris Boike), familiar from previous Boonie Bears outings, holding a cute baby, seeing the child’s beautiful mother approach them and then coming down to Earth when her tourist husband turns up behind him.

The disappointed Vick guides his charges to snow-covered mountain Crystal Peak, where a combination of awkward customers and Vick’s slipping on a banana skin causes a noise which triggers a deadly avalanche. And a wormhole opening in the sky, from which falls a boy with jetpack shoes. He perches on a high branch, marvelling as a butterfly alights on his glove. Elsewhere, two besuited figures emerge from the depths of a lake. And Vick thinks he sees a previously unnoticed cave entrance part way up the mountain.

His discovery is interrupted by the arrival of bears Briar (voice: Patrick Freeman) and Bramble (voice: Joseph S. Lambert) – Bramble is the younger one with the yellowish fur and Briar the older one with reddish fur – who are not happy having collected a basketful of non-recyclable, plastic waste from Vick’s tour guests. He escapes them to explore the cave only to be fired by his irate boss by phone – until he delays his redundancy with new of the “sure-fire tour price hike” new valley.

It clearly isn’t Vick’s day, because just as he’s about to touch a large, man-sized, attractive, pink, spherical flower, he is yanked away from behind by the jetpack shoe boy who encases Vick in an object that looks like a giant orange and informs him he is “the Big Boom, the destroyer of our world”.

He in turn is interrupted by the arrival of wannabe superhero couple Harper (female – voice: Ruth Urquhart) and Logan (male – voice: Joseph S. Lambert again) and a frenzied fight ensues, during which Vick’s attempted escape causes him to collide with (and swallow some of) the man-sized, pink plant accidentally releasing its spores, the very act the jet shoe boy had been determined to prevent. The arrival of Bramble and Briar, who have heard Vick’s cries for help, and the ensuing mayhem causes the boy’s blue crystal to send all six flying through a Doctor Who titles slitscan-style wormhole.

Vick, Briar and Bramble wake in a landscape covered with pink flora, one of which is stopped from eating Bramble alive by the intervention of jetshoe boy and his plant-decapitating spinning disc. He explains that this is the future, and that the giant mushroom formation (looking for all the world like a mushroom cloud) on the horizon caused by the spores Vick released grows larger by the day. Storming off, Vick treads on another purple plant and is turned to stone, but recovers quickly, telling jetshoe boy that Vick’s immune system might contain information as to how to combat the pink spores. After an unnecessary flash forward explaining this, as If it wasn’t obvious, jetshoe boy finally reveals his name as Saylor (voice: Nicola Vincent).

After more plant shenanigans, our heroes arrive at Mayor Trystan’s secret mineral mine and steal an aerial vehicle. From there, the film largely descends into one fight or flight sequence after another, ditching for the most part the quirky inventiveness that made the last three films in this franchise so enjoyable, and it becomes hard to maintain audience interest in the plot. It’s as if the producers have had a meeting and instructed the writers, directors and animators to remove all the quirky elements and make the whole thing more straight-laced. The backgrounds and 3D modelled sets, countryside and cities overrun by toxic pink vegetation, are impressive, but production design hasn’t yet made a great film in and of itself.

When Mayor Trystan (voice: Christopher Price) finally turns up and reveals himself to be not the good guy but the villain of the piece, the character seems to bring a little of what’s lacking and the film picks up, but by then it’s too little too late. That’s a pity, because the first half hour is promising, but in this feature, nothing much is given to the Bears or Vick to do, with the film being carried more by new character Saylor than any established character. Saylor scarcely feels original, resembling yet another reworking of the black-haired, orange-jacketed central character of long-running anime Dragon Ball Z (TV series, 1989-1996), similarly the template for the central character in Ne Zha 2 (Yang Yu aka Jiaozi, 2025).

In terms of the English language voice cast, the production company appears to have slimmed down its pool of English-speaking actors to six, with those actors doubling up for the remaining bit parts and Kieran Katarey credited with Additional Voices. Chris Boike and franchise familiar name Olivia Seaton-Hill are credited with Dubbing Director and English Dubbing Script respectively. The English language voice dub here bis merely proficient, whereas previous entries have seemed excellent in this regard.

Boonie Bears Future Reborn is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, April 18th.

Trailer:

Trailer 2: