Tiger-Team - Der Berg der 1000 Drachen (2010)

According to legend, a 14th-century child emperor suffering from an incurable illness lived in the Moonlight Palace, located in the Mountain of a Thousand Dragons. The entrance to the palace was locked with three keys and remained undiscovered. Six hundred years later, when the Tiger Team—Biggi, Patrick, and Luk—visit the Chinese restaurant run by their cousin Mae, they accidentally break a statue that Mr. Bai had brought from his father Cheng, Mae’s godfather, as a gift for Mae. Mr. Bai runs a research station for giant pandas in China and has come to Vienna to advise the Vienna Zoo on setting up an enclosure for two new pandas. Hidden inside the statue is a dragon sculpture dating from the Ming dynasty. When the Vienna Zoo holds a contest whose winners will be allowed to collect the two pandas for the zoo from China, the children rig the contest in their favor by submitting hundreds of entries. They ultimately win with their suggested names for the pandas: “Laughing Sun” and “Little Moon.” Along with Mr. Bai, zookeeper Krops, and Ms. Papus from the zoo, they set off for China. Sixty years earlier, Grandfather Cheng had come into possession of his dragon by chance while playing with his friends Lin and Wang. A man entrusted them with a bundle containing three dragon sculptures. The man fled in a panic from masked men who had tattoos of a black snake on the backs of their hands. The dragon sculptures turn out to be the keys to entering the Moonlight Palace in the Mountain of a Thousand Dragons. During the night, a masked person bearing the same snake tattoo steals their key. Since a cosmetics company called Q Cosmetics has a similar snake symbol as its logo and is also headquartered in Beijing, they head to the company. There, they do indeed find their key again. However, the company’s boss, Lady Q, and her son Munroe are already expecting them and throw them out. The child emperor suffered from a rare allergy to sunlight. His mother had the palace built inside a mountain, where the child could spend the day and leave the palace only in the moonlight. When the mother had researchers search for a medicine for her son’s illness, they discovered a liquid that brought a dead butterfly back to life. The liquid was called “The Elixir of Eternal Life.” In a museum, they discover a painting of the child emperor with his mother. They take a photograph of it and, after editing it on a computer, discover a map showing the entrance to the Mountain of a Thousand Dragons. They set out to find the other two keys, which Cheng’s former friends Lin and Wang possess. When they go looking for Lin, they meet Mea-Ling, who tells them that Lin has died and left behind an old frying pan. The pan’s handle turns out to be the second key. While searching for Wang, Cheng is kidnapped at the fish market. The Tiger Team must hand all three keys over to Lady Q for Cheng to be released. Wang has left numbers as a clue to the third key; they turn out to be geographical coordinates pointing to a watchtower on the Great Wall of China. There, they find the third key inside a bell, but Lady Q’s men take it from them again. Lady Q wants the elixir analyzed in her laboratories and to manufacture large quantities of it herself, so she can create an army of immortal soldiers and become the most powerful woman in the world. When they deliver the last key to Lady Q in exchange for the captured Cheng, they are forced to accompany Lady Q and her people to the mountain. After entering the palace, they really do find the elixir there. Meanwhile, Krops has alerted the police, and Lady Q and her people are taken away. Since the elixir would pose too great a danger to humanity if it fell into the wrong hands, it is supposed to be poured away. The Tiger Team then decides to give it to the pandas instead, so this endangered animal species can survive. The children plan to use their reward to buy land on the Mountain of a Thousand Dragons and establish a giant panda wildlife park there, to be named after the child emperor, Ming Shu. The park would thus fulfill his mother’s wish and make the child emperor immortal.