Disney’s newest nature documentary,
Chimpanzee, tells a good story. It shows the development of a baby
chimp as he grows and learns about the world of the jungle all around him. His
mother begins to teach him how to find food, how to groom, how to survive. But
then something terrible happens. His mother goes missing, probably killed by a
predator like a leopard, and the poor little chimp is orphaned, alone and barely
more than helpless. His attempts to find a fully-grown chimp to help him are
difficult, but then help arrives from an unexpected member of the group and an
unlikely bond is formed.
The above reads like a very Disney description. It could just
as well describe a vibrant, musical animated version of the same events. (In
fact, in its broad strokes, isn’t it kind of Bambi with a light splash of The
Jungle Book?) The remarkable thing here, though, is that this story is
true. A team of British wildlife documentarians was out getting remarkably
intimate footage of chimpanzees in the wild and happened to be in the right
place at the right time to catch the story of this young chimp. Though clearly culled
from hundreds of hours of footage and then heavily edited to make this short
documentary flow with a narrative arc, the basic observation of these animals
is what really makes this movie special.
There’s something so strangely human in the eyes of a chimp.
When the cameras catch them staring in their general direction, there’s a
chance to watch the way the light darts around the eyes, the way the eyes shift
and dance with something more than mere primal primate instincts. They look
like they’re thinking; they look like they’re feeling. Science tells us that
chimpanzees have DNA that is 99% identical to human DNA. That has to explain
how, as the movie shows us chimps using tools, making plans, showing affection,
fear and anger, it feels all so eerie and adorable and fascinating. They’re so
close to humans and yet that extra 1% makes them so far away as well.
That’s what directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield (who
created the BBC’s essential Planet Earth miniseries)
have made excellent use of in creating Chimpanzee.
They trust that their remarkable footage is just that. It’s a rare chance to
see chimps in the wild behaving as chimps do. They use sticks and rocks to
crack open a harvest of nuts. They bend branches into nests for sleeping
through the night. Little chimps roughhouse. Adults fight over territory with a
rival group of chimps. And through it all the little chimp that is our focus –
the film names him Oscar and I suppose there’s no way to ask the chimps what
his real name is – provides an adorable, intensely sympathetic throughline.
Where Fothergill and Linfield hedge their bets, where the
documentary feels most Disney for the worse, is the wall-to-wall narration from
Tim Allen. His voice is warm and inviting, with great energy and likability.
(Come to think of it, if you were, for some reason, making a list of Top Five
Tim Allen movies, three would have to be his voice acting in the Toy Story movies). He’s not really the
problem here. What bothered me was the way the narration goes inside the minds
of the chimps, projecting and anthropomorphizing in ways that the footage and
the story itself doesn’t. When it sticks to the facts about the chimps and their
rituals, social behaviors and routines, it’s just fine. I didn’t even mind some
of the more strictly subjective judgments, like calling the rival chimps
fighting over the territory “enemies,” although at times reducing the
complexity of a wild ecosystem into good-guy bad-guy seems a bit too easy. What
really bothered me were moments like when the branch Oscar’s using as a tool
breaks before cracking a nut and Allen says, speaking presumably for Oscar,
“Hey! This is defective!” Later, he’ll even be asked to do his Home Improvement grunt. (Or maybe he
volunteered it.)
The footage of the chimps is so often incredible that I wish
they’d scaled back the narration. It’s the aspect of the film that seems most
calculated to children in the audience, but it’s misjudged and at some points
comes across as talking down to the entire audience. But the story that the
documentarians were lucky enough to capture is so strong, so interesting, that
it’s almost enough to overpower my objections. I’m not suggesting that the
story occurred exactly as presented. There’s definitely editing involved in
helping in the shaping of the footage into this narrative, clarifying and
eliding in equal measure, but I don’t think that there’s anything as nefarious
as Disney’s infamous True-Life Adventures
shorts of the 50s and 60s, which occasionally mixed fiction into their
documenting to make the narrative better (including forcing lemmings off of a
cliff to get some good shots).
Chimpanzee, even
when it steps wrong, is filled with reverence for these animals. It’s a film
that cares deeply about their plight and their struggles, but isn’t a film that
foregrounds such ecological considerations. Instead, it’s a film that tells a
good story while giving audiences an up-close (albeit G-rated) look at the way
chimps behave, a chance to be Jane Goodall from the comfort of a multiplex. When
the end credits reveal how the worldwide population of chimps has dwindled in
the last 50 years, there’s clearly more facts to be told, but, emotionally
speaking, there’s not much more to be said in that moment. Over the course of
80 minutes, we’ve spent time with them, we’ve come to love them (or had a love
reinforced), and now we’re hopefully left wanting to save them.
