Movie Review: 'African Cats'
by KYW's Bill Wine
African Cats is a nature documentary with spellbinding real-life footage shot on the vast grasslands of East Africa.
The subtitle, Kingdom of Courage, tells you that there will be dramatic license taken in this portrait of courage and love. And that it will be perhaps a tad too anthropomorphic an approach for some adult tastes. But also that that narrative style will certainly contribute to the child-friendly nature of this nature doc.
The film chronicles the circle of life of two cat clans -- one lions and one cheetahs -- in the African Savanna raising their young in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya's southwest region, and trying to keep them out of the crocodile-infested waters. Their stories overlap and intersect, with most of the running time devoted to cats running from and/or running after other creatures on the food chain.
As promised, the "plot" focuses on the troubles of several African cats: Mara is a little lion cub, a born survivor, being raised by Layla, his strong, knowing mother, an aging lioness; Sita is a resourceful mother cheetah with five still-blind and helpless newborns whom she must leave behind, unprotected from the mortal dangers represented by the nearby lions, when she hunts for food for them; Fang is the leader of the river pride, a pack of lionesses feeding their young while he patrols, defending his family from a banished lion who intends to challenge him for supremacy.
As explained by narrator Samuel L. Jackson, reading a script by director and co-producer Keith Scholey and John Truby, their circle of life nearly always involves the threat of imminent death provided by other nearby creatures on the savanna.
Directors Scholey and Alastair Fothergill (Earth) spent nearly three years waiting for their collection of privileged moments and dramatic confrontations, some of them thrilling, and have gotten amazingly close to their photographic prey. And if their narrative fails to provide us a glimpse of anything we've never seen before, what is showcased is compelling and visually commanding.
The breathtaking cinematography and measured editing help to support the admittedly thin focus. But it's these photogenic creatures that are the main attraction here -- for children and grownups alike -- and there are few things more mesmerizing than footage of graceful, handsome cats running at top speed but shot in super slow motion.
The hunter-versus-hunted confrontations on display, while G-rated, are nonetheless not sugarcoated. The survival-of-the-fittest jeopardy and distress absolutely dominates the narrative: the peril is constant. Hey, it's a jungle out there -- and up there. Just so parents of youngsters know. But they should also know that this is essentially a real-life Lion King adventure for the kids, so that death as part of the circle of life seems an appropriate lesson to be learned for young viewers. And it's handled tastefully, even gingerly, by the filmmakers.
Meanwhile, this visual treat is also a celebration of motherhood -- the fiercest variety of it there is, apparently.
So we'll lionize 2-1/2 stars out of 4 for African Cats, a dependably watchable if overly familiar animal kingdom melodrama for the family audience that's as much a Mother's Day card as it is an Earth Day catalyst.
