Friday, April 20, 2012

Disney's Chimpanzee: an adorable monkey 'documentary' in which not a single chimp rips off anybody's face

The promotional verbiage from Disney says it all: "DisneyNature presents a documentary directed by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield."
     But please don't get the idea that the "directors" of the documentary threw rocks at the animals to get them to move in interesting ways like in the bad old days of Disney nature films of the 50s. During this film, the moviemakers stayed 7 meters away from their subjects at all times and wore masks to keep them from catching human diseases like the propensitiy to anthropomorphize other species to make more money at the box office.
     We at AKSARBENT don't want to appear cynical, but we couldn't help noticing the observation on  National Public Radio's Fresh Aire that the director approached Disney with a script for a nature documentary before he started observing the animals:
Alastair Fothergill, who had previously worked together on the documentary film Earth, approached Disney with a 70-page script about a group of chimpanzees living in Western Africa.
     Anyway, in the role of Bambi, is "Oscar" (!) an orphaned, but adorable chimp stunningly photographed with the latest cameras. (The new digital cameras are a big deal in nature photography. They're smaller, lighter, don't require clumsy canisters of 35mm film, and have an incredibly wide dynamic range which can easily be expanded in post-production. This is invaluable when photographing the shadow detail of dense forests penetrated by blindingly bright shafts of light — a scenario that has always been a nightmare for cinematographers in the past.)

But we digress. Back to the plot, as recounted by Chicago Sun-Times film reviewer Nell Minow:
 "The jungle itself is a living, healthy thing that does not want to be eaten,” [Tim] Allen tells us.
      Nuts are hard to open and honey is guarded by bees. As the area is cut into by development, food becomes harder to find.
     The chimps are threatened by an invasion from a nearby group of hungry chimps with “a formidable leader named Scar.”
     The choice of names and framing of the story unhesitatingly directs our loyalties. Scar “steals” but Freddy and his tribe bravely forage for food.

No comments:

Post a Comment

ShareThis