Nature doc hits sweet spot
April 22 is Earth Day, which means it’s time for Disneynature to release its latest kid-friendly environmental documentary. I’ve stopped expecting any heavyduty science from these adorable films, and taken to hoping the narrator doesn’t grate on the ears.
Easily the low point on that front was Tim Allen’s jokey, mugging voice-over to 2012’s Chimpanzee, which had me wanting to throw feces at the screen. Samuel L. Jackson’s commentary on 2011’s African Cats was perfect, in part because you never knew if he was going to swear.
This one features Tina Fey who, let’s face it, can do no wrong. Writer, producer, actor, Oscarnominated director and Nobel laureate — some of those are made up — Fey now adds narrator to her list of accomplishments, and hits the sweet spot between cloyingly earnest and am-I-really-being-asked-to-saythis? Though if you listen carefully you can catch a welcome whiff of cynicism.
For the monkeys, however, this is serious business. The film follows a group of toque macaques (named for their natural bowl cuts) living in the ruins of an ancient city in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. Maya, with “big, friendly eyes,” ekes out an existence near the bottom of the troop’s social hierarchy, which is conveniently duplicated in the physical strata they occupy in the trees.
At the top, literally as well as figuratively, is “the sisterhood,” a trio of alpha females with handily evil-looking mugs that look as though they overdid it on the rouge. Also up there is Raja, who has “first rights in all things,” the nearest the film comes to admitting that monkeys have sex, too.
There are, to be sure, tense scenes of battle with another troop, and even the death of a monkey, which results in an oddly touching gathering of macaques around their fallen comrade. As is so often the case with nature docs, Monkey Kingdom reveals (and revels in) a common wellspring of mammalian emotional responses that we humans still share.
The kids’ favourite scene will no doubt be the one in which the monkeys invade a human settlement and help themselves to a birthday-party buffet. It’s clearly a setup, but it’s shamelessly enjoyable.