It’s become a tradition for Disney to release a nature-related film around Earth Day each year and donate a portion of the ticket sales from the first week to a nature-related cause. This year’s film is about a family of chimpanzees living in a remote part of Africa and 20 cents from each ticket sold during the opening week went to the Jane Goodall Institute for the Disneynature Tchimpounga Nature Reserve Project with a minimum of $100,000 pledged to the program.
I was one of those who saw the movie opening weekend and for anyone who enjoys nature films or learning about primates, DisneyNature again did an amazing job of bringing viewers into the heart of the jungle. The film is a little on the short side and the death in the film is less prominent than the two in last year’s “African Cats” where a mother lion and a couple cheetah cubs died, making this year’s movie a better fit for kids.
The film is narrated by Tim Allen who gives a light feel to the sometimes dramatic film. Directed by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, the camera crew spent enough time in the jungle to develop a lucid storyline that is compelling to viewers. More than that, they got some great and unexpected footage, including some time lapse sequences that show the unique organisms that survive in the jungle. The images of glow-in-the dark fungi and other rare plants was really cool to watch.
The filmmakers weave together a story that is cohesive for viewers and, as with most Disney films, this movie has its heroes and its villains. Oscar is a young chimpanzee at the beginning of the film. He is the smallest baby in his community, which includes several adult males, females and other young chimpanzees. He is dependent on his mother Isha for food, safety and training. At the beginning, the film starts with a light-hearted sequence of the youngsters playing around on trees as though they were a jungle gym.
As the film goes on, Oscar begins to grow up a little bit and take his first steps toward independence as he ventures away from his mother for short spurts. The leader of his group is Freddy, an alpha male who is charged with leading the other chimpanzees to places with plenty of food and with keeping out a rival troupe. Even though the jungles of West Africa are lush, a lot of the vegetation is not edible for the animals. The chimpanzees live off fruit, nuts and the occasional lower primate that they hunt for meat.
Freddy’s main rival is an old chimpanzee that the filmmakers dubbed Scar. Scar has a cloudy eye from an old injury, and he has a lot of strong males to back him up. Freddy’s group is smaller, but the social structure of his group makes them able to survive well.
The movie displays a lot of the common practices of chimpanzees and some lesser known activities. For decades, it has been known that chimpanzees use sticks and rocks as tools in their hunt for food. Freddy’s group has access to a nut grove in their territory, but the ripest nuts have a hard shell into which they cannot bite. One of the things Oscar’s mother teaches him is how to use rocks to open the nuts. Try as he might, the youngster is more likely to hit his own fingers than the nut when he tries to emulate his mother. She always offers up plenty of morsels from her own collection.
Oscar will learn how to use the tools to gather food and how to build a nest out of tree branches from his mother. He also learns the importance of grooming in maintaining the hierarchy in the group. Alpha male Freddy spends hours grooming his allies to keep the group cohesive so that when they do hunt for lower primates, they have success.
The movie plays up the rivalry between Freddy and Scar’s groups, who share a border on their territory. Scar’s group uses a storm to raid Freddy’s group. In the fight Oscar is separated from his mother. Isha is lost in the jungle without her mates to protect her. Narrator Allen says that other chimpanzees who have been separated have been attacked by leopards. Nothing is shown on screen of the attack, but Isha does not return to her baby.
Oscar looks for his mother, but eventually he has to focus on his growing hunger. The young chimp is too little to fend for himself. He tries to open nuts, but he hadn’t mastered the technique before his mother was lost. The young chimp approaches other members of the group, but is brushed aside. The other female chimps have babies of their own to care for and the males are uninterested in helping him. The young primate grows visibly thinner and his fur looks unkempt without a mother to groom him.
But Oscar shows a kind of resilience when he approaches the one chimp that none of the filmmakers expected to accept him – he goes up to Freddy who offers him food. Freddy grooms the young chimpanzee and even allows the baby to ride on his back as only a mother would. It was an unexpected conclusion that even the filmmakers in outtakes at the end of the film said was shocking.
The movie is fun to watch and heartwarming. The outtakes at the end are worth waiting for to see a little of what the filmmakers went through to get the amazing footage.
