African Cats Review

• 15th Apr 2012

We are truly a nation of cat lovers. Barely a Christmas passes without a fuzzy kitten playing in the snow peeping out from our mantel pieces and videos of small kittens falling over are the talk of the cyber world for months on end. As the doting owner of five furry bundles of joy, you can imagine my ecstasy to be going to watch African Cats, Disney sub-branch DisneyNature’s answer to The Lion King (which I loved, of course).

Like many of the best tales, African Cats follows the struggle of two rival families to survive incredibly adverse conditions whilst triumphing supreme over the other. These are not the Montagues and the Capulets, or even the Flintstones and the Rubbles… these two families are the River Pride, who live south of great river which divides Kenya’s Masai Mara, and Kali and his four sons, who rule the north side. As you may have guessed, they’re all lions. I didn’t know exactly what to expect from this film; dubbing a la Babe or editing at its best in the style of Disney’s live action 101 Dalmatians, or something completely different altogether.

What I got was a fully fledged nature documentary (narrated by Patrick Stewart, nonetheless!) featuring some of the most stunning and intimate footage of the African Wilderness I have ever seen, perfectly and sensitively pitched at kiddies but doubtless just as impactful for the adults watching it with them. The ‘characters’ are given names but not personalities; these emerge naturally through the beautifully shot scenes which almost put The Lion King to shame for their strong natural characters. There’s ageing but experienced Layla and her cub Mara of the River Pride, whose heart-wrenching story brings about a great deal of sniffing and Fang, the leader of the pride, whose boldness and determination makes his inevitable overthrow all the more difficult to swallow.

Rival Kali comes off a bit like a cross between The Terminator and a 1920s LA gangster. He rarely goes anywhere without the protection of his four brutish sons whose reign of intimidation is difficult not to take a great disliking to. His attempted conquests of the River Pride are genuinely tense moments to watch, even without the mood-setting narration.

But amongst these two warring tribes, another story is being told: that of Sita the Cheetah and her five newborn cubs, bound to produce the most ‘aaaaaw!’-ing and gushing this side of a maternity ward. Struggling to raise her children in the midst of this age old battle, with hyenas and starvation constant threats, her story is nothing short of inspirational.

African Cats’ greatest achievement is its ability to deal very bluntly with very difficult life lessons at a level which children can appreciate without feeling it’s too heavy. The film deals marvellously with death, birth, power and rivalry without a hint of infantilizing any of it, with remarkable success. Watching this film I was sat next to a little girl who had come to watch with her father and elder brother (I assume) and hearing her every gasp and bated breath was more than enough to tell me that DisneyNature have managed to create a film which doesn’t aim to distract children from life, or move them forward too quickly, simply to present it like it is in the wild. With no Playstation 3s and no Justin Beiber around to protect them from the harsh realities of real life, African Cats presents a world children can relate to in which life, death and everything in between are just as important as the fun and games they’ve come to expect from modern media.

Dani Singer