The annual Disney Earth Day documentary submission gets weaker every year and this is no exception. First of all, big cats are a lousy documentary subject for the G-rated crowd. Cats sleep 20 hours a day, are notoriously territorial, even among other cats, and view all living things as either “something to kill” or “something to run away from”. Let’s face it; the best of what they do is hunt, and you can’t show the best parts of big cat hunting to a G crowd. As predators, they’re massive unforgiving bullies until something actually fights back and then they run-away like a Monty Python Arthurian knight. This critter rarely elicits positive emotion from the human crowd. You kind of have to project positive impressions of predatory cats. I don’t know what Disney was thinking here.
African Cats is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. You can probably make up your conversation here, but it’s sure to have gone something like:
“Can we get Morgan Freeman?”
“No.”
“Who’s next best?”
“I don’t know. Does he have to be black?”
“Yeah. It is ‘African Cats’ after all. People will respect our commitment to diversity.”
“Hmmm. How about Denzel Washington?”
“Won’t do it.”
“OK, how about that guy from Snakes on a Plane? People love him. Hey, he’s even worked with animals before, hasn’t he?”
Dollars to doughnuts that’s the exact conversation Disney had at some point. Now Samuel L. Jackson can be fine for the sub-10-year-old crowd, but for those of us who have heard Samuel L. Jackson say the word “mutherf******” more than a dozen times, his rhetoric will come off sounding sarcastic instead of sincere. I know he’s not intending to do so, but Samuel L. Jackson narrating the behavior of parental cheetahs sounds as if the movie to him is just one big stupid in-joke; his voice simply lacks the gravitas for the tense situations and makes the lighter ones almost comical. Keep in mind that cats, all cats big or small, have no sense of humor. That’s why those I Can Has Cheezeburger books are funny.
Bottom line here is nature films are kind of dull, so there has to be a twist, something to move an audience – take a page out of March of the Penguins: tell the tale of life and death of awkward helpless weeble-wobbles against the elements; otherwise it’s just another Discovery Channel waste-of-90-minutes.
Rated G, 89 Minutes
D: Alastair Fothergill, Keith Scholey
W: Keith Scholey, John Truby
Genre: The annual Earth Day slump
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Your house cat
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Foes of Discovery Channel
