African Cats

Hello all,

Yesterday afternoon I had an opportunity to attend a preview screening of the upcoming Disney Nature film, African Cats. The film opens nationwide on Earth day (4/22 – also Animal Kingdom’s 13th anniversary). The film chronicles the lives of two mothers raising their offspring on the savanna, a cheetah and a lion.

Versus me trying to explain it, check out the latest trailer for an overview of the film:

As you can tell from the clip the visuals are amazing and seeing them on the big screen is even more spectacular. There is a great mixture of stunning wide angle shots and tight action/detail shots. Overall I enjoyed the visuals and thought the story was solid. At times I thought the narration did not live up to what you were seeing but it worked more or less. I read the book (Disney Nature: African Cats: The Story Behind the Film several weeks ago so I knew what to expect going in. I was a little disappointed that the movie did not do a better job conveying the sense of time and space. You had a hard time understanding if a day, week, month, season had passed since the last scene. As for space it was really hard to follow where the action was and the distance involved.

The film is rated “G” and going in I was a little surprised by this. How do you show a documentary about two types of predators and keep it a G rating? The film makers did. There are a few shots of recent kills/eating and some fight sequences but the blood is kept to a minimum and overall very clean thanks to some angles and obstructions in the shots. I thought to keep this rating they sacrificed some potentially interesting shots, some of the chase and fight sequences seemed to cut rather quickly and that was my hunch as to why, but I understand why they wanted a G rating, it being a Disney Nature film after all.

For those of you who do go see the film be sure to stick around for the credits, they were hilarious!

So have you seen the film yet? If so what did you think??

On the films YouTube Channel they have quite a few clips from the film. Here are a couple of the more recent postings: