Sunday Review: African Cats & Chimpanzee

Their personal wild

By Morris Dean

I returned the African Cats Blu-ray disc to the library unwatched the first time. It was, after all, just a Disney nature documentary and, besides, I could catch it another, slower time. That turned out to be only two days later. The librarian said it was on the shelf. Would I like to borrow it? And Disney's Chimpanzee was there too, so?

    Both films are serious nature documentaries, both involving years on location – two for the cats, in the African savannah of the Maasai Mara National Reserve, a major game region in southwestern Kenya; and four for the chimps, in the Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, one of the last areas of primary rain forest in West Africa – it was hard for the photographers in the jungle to get an unobstructed shot for trees and other vegetation, especially from very far away, and chimpanzees tend to avoid humans.
    Disneynature Productions was serious, too, in trying to educate viewers that these animals need and deserve help to survive, as their habitat is encroached by farming to sustain larger and larger human populations. A portion of the proceeds for African Cats was donated to the African Wildlife Foundation and their effort to preserve Kenya's Amboseli Wildlife Corridor, under the initiative, "See African Cats, Save the Savanna." A similar donation was made for Chimpanzee to the Jane Goodall Institute, to benefit chimpanzees in the wild. "See Chimpanzee, Save Chimpanzees."

To me, and avowedly to the documentaries' crews also, the films aren't even just "nature" films, about some animals in general that are far removed from civilized human concerns. In both films there are particular animals, known by name and recognizable as individuals, who provide the dramatic arc that each film shows and narrates. These individuals' stories involve emotions that humans can relate to and identify with, and easily consider "almost human."
    We need a term to cover those emotions. I suggest the familiar one, personal. I like the term because I've come to think of animals as persons – of course they are, if there's any justice, or we care to legislate and protect it. Human animals are obviously persons, that's what we've always meant by the term, but "persons," in my view, includes non-human animals whom humans can interact with in some way (and I don't mean interact by subjecting them to scientific experiments, shooting them for sport, or slaughtering them for meat).

The cats in African Cats (2011, directed by Alastair Fothergill & Keith Scholey, and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson & Patrick Stewart) are a family in a pride of lions south of the river, and a family of cheetahs nearby who are trying to survive on the African savannah. And their persons of interest are, among the lions: Mara, a female lion cub, and her aging, worn mother, Layla, and their pride's aging leader, Fang; and, among the cheetahs, Sita, a younger mother with five newborns.
    Both the lions' and the cheetahs' stories are propelled by the lion pride's rivalry with a larger pride north of the river. Kali, the leader of the northern pride, wants to expand his territory southward, and during a patrol with his four sons threatens Sita's five cubs. Sita successfully distracts the lions' attention away from her children, but in the excitement they scatter and only three of them return in the morning.
    Layla is kicked by a zebra while hunting and seriously injured, so that she and Mara can't keep up when their pride migrates to follow the wildebeest....The action is complex enough (I won't give any more of it away), and involves a large enough cast of characters, that the overlapping stories give a very good impression of a typical feature film. It's theme...mother's love!

African Cats is a tremendously moving, affecting film. The familial cheetahs and the familial lions nudge and nuzzle one another in their families the way our poodle Siegfried nudges and nuzzles us (and we him).
    The cats' stories are persuasive in that they seem to arise straight out of the material you are watching; they don't seem to be imposed on the material by human narration.
    I became completely absorbed in and identified with the personal emotions displayed by the feline principals. "Feature film" and "nature documentary" were successfully one for this viewer.
    The Blu-ray disc has extensive bonus material that you can access at various pertinent points from the main narrative. The cheetah photographer (a woman who looks like a cross between Scarlette Johanson and Rebecca Hall) was in the field for two years on the movie, and she provides some colorful background information.

The persons of interest in Chimpanzee (2012, directed by Alastair Fothergill & Mark Linfield, and narrated by Tim Allen) are Oscar, a toddler in his early years; his mother Isha, who tends to and instructs Oscar how to survive in the jungle; and Freddie, the tribe's independent, self-contained leader.
    The story's plot parallels that of the lions Mara & Layla; it revolves around Oscar's loss of his mother following an attack on their tribe by a rival tribe of chimpanzees. There is no documentary evidence of Isha's death (other than her disappearance following the attack), and it is conjectured that she was separated from the group, perhaps injured, and fell easy prey to a nocturnal leopard.
    There is substantial footage of young Oscar looking for his mother, trying to find food, losing weight, attempting to find another adult to take care of him but being rebuffed.
    The production team admits in the bonus material that when Isha disappeared, they feared that that was the end of their film. But something extraordinary happened, and Oscar was adopted by Freddie, the first instance of such an adoption in a wild chimpanzee tribe to be documented on film. Freddie's independent ways change significantly as he comes to spend solid hours helping Oscar crack nuts and catch insects, grooming Oscar's hair and removing ticks, and letting Oscar ride around on his back, same as chimp toddlers normally do with their mothers.
    Substantial documentary footage is devoted to the chimps' use of tools for breaking nuts and collecting insects to eat (e.g., termites and ants).

Of the two films, African Cats is my favorite, even if Chimpanzee was even more stirring in one way: chimpanzees look so human! But African Cats had portrayed its principal persons so richly, I couldn't help finding comparative weaknesses in Chimpanzee – mainly its relatively skimpy narrative footage. But the film's bonus material's explanation of the daunting challenges the crew faced convinced me not to press those criticisms hard.
_______________
Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

Comment box is located below