May 04, 2008 03:32PM EDT

Film Junkie Reports: Meerkat Manor Good Intro to Festival for Kids

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Since I was able to take my wife to the festival Friday night, Saturday morning I followed this up by taking my daughter back to the same theater (different film). She has recently been quite enthralled by Wonder Pets, Go Diego Go, the American Museum of Natural History, and basically anything dealing with exotic animals. So we finally bit the bullet and got a yearlong New York City zoo pass, but I also thought it’d be much easier to take her to a screening of Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins.

She was extremely excited and brought her three plastic African animal figurines (a zebra, rhinoceros, and lioness) along so they could learn more about where they live. Wearing a festival pass was fun and perhaps the best part was the décor of the theater at the Village East Cinemas—chandelier, themed art, balcony-esque seating; she’d never watched a film in any place like that before. She’s only four and pretty lightweight, so the large seat did tend to spring up and squish her, but we dealt with that easily enough.

Nature documentaries have come a long way in the last half-century, with work by the BBC Natural History Unit, American cable television sponsors (Animal Planet was responsible for this film, for instance), and a host of independent feature films—some of my favorites of recent years include Atlantis, Anima Mundi, Microcosmos, Winged Migration, and so on. In their way, these films have succeeded in creating a new genre of narrator-less nature films, with the focus squarely on the cinematography (and perhaps music). Add March of the Penguins and you’ve got a thriving nature documentary scene, with new festivals sprouting up (I got a flier for the Jackson Hole Film Festival at a screening the other night) and increased interest across the globe. 

Meerkat Manor is designed to fit into that field and is therefore an interesting but effective mix of styles. On the one hand it definitely has a strong interest in stunning cinematography, from the extreme clos-ups of yawning meerkats to sprawling helicopter shots of the African desert and savannah. The attempt to fully document the habitat of one single species, as with March of the Penguins, was clearly evident. On the other hand, the narration, spoken by Whoopi Goldberg, harkened back to Walt Disney’s True Life Adventure films of the 1950s (Seal Island, Bear Country, etc.), at least as I remember them, in anthropomorphizing the animals—giving them names, human motivations and emotions, comic situations, etc. Strict naturalists have problems with such editorializing, but it made the film good fun for the kids, and we now know a lot more about meerkats than we would have otherwise, even with the fictive elements. There were definitely some parts too scary for a four-year-old, but for ages six and up this was a great and original film. Top it off with a candied apple from the 3rd Avenue street fair, and it was a great child’s introduction of what a film festival can be all about.