Chimpanzee

CHIMPANZEE

Tim the Tool Man Taylor narrates a touching story about an orphaned chimp.

2012: DisneyNature

2012, Nature Documentary, Rated G

Distributed by DisneyNature

          I'm a fan of documentaries. They're great because they're for a certain audience usually, one that wants to learn more about the subject of the film. When viewing a documentary made for kids, however, there isn't much to digest other than visuals. The true story told in Chimpanzee is incredible, the cinematography breathtaking at times, but the filmmakers tailored it to kids. 

          Tim Allen provides narration on this documentary about a chimp named Oscar whose mother dies, and against all odds, is taken under the care of the head male named Freddy. Allen does a good enough job for part of it, but when he starts actually talking to Oscar, saying "Shh, Oscar, Shhh", when a predator is nearby, you realize this is a straight-up kid's movie. I almost expected him to ask the audience for help, pleading "Come on kids, tell Oscar to quiet down or he'll be someone's lunch!". This didn't happen, to my great relief. But then, later on, he pronounces a fruit called Sacoglottis and says "Try saying that three times fast." Imagine if Discovery Channel narrators said naive things like that? Oh well, like I said, it's for kids. I felt alienated.

          As I said, the cinematography was breathtaking at times. There were those eerie time-lapse shots of crawling vines and sprouting mushrooms. There is a particularly stunning slow motion scene of a rain storm. These, fleeting and too few, were the most visually intense sequences. The shots of other animals, not just chimps, were on display as well, creating a full picture of the forest where the main characters live.

          When I say "characters", I mean it. The main problem I had with this film was the assigning of human emotions to animals, even those as intelligent as chimps. The word love is thrown around quite a bit, more than it should. I had a problem with this. Members of Oscar's group were humanized, yet the story that unfolds is true, and must be more complicated than rooted in the human invention that is "love". What seemed to be happening in my eyes was a brutal display of their war- and gang-like behaviour. The rival group was referred to as a "mob", or a "gang", whereas Oscar's innocent little tribe was called a "family" or a "group". They're all chimps. What if the other group was a whole mess of orphans with their own tear-inducing stories? I sure have no idea, because I'm in an air conditioned movie theater in America.

          It was quite the experience, wonderfully brief because of the film's under an hour and a half run time. There were children and their mothers here and there in the theater. Who would spend over thirty dollars to bring their kids to a movie that they won't even watch? Instead, the kid will sit right behind me, and halfway through the movie begin a constant drone of "I wanna go home...I wanna go home...I wanna go home...". I would have told her to zip it if I didn't feel just like her at the exact same moment.

Side note: The shots at the end, with the filmmakers speaking about their experience, was the most interesting sequence to me.