Adventures In Zambezia Review
There would appear that over the last 20 years in family animated features the plots have all seemed to have revolved around only a couple of basic premises. This usually involves a young (animal of one description or another) leaving the nest to find adventure, misadventure or coming of age outside of his or her comfort zone and locale where they grew up with the belief that the grass is greener on the other side. This can be seen in such modern classics as The Lion King (1994), Rio (2011), Finding Nemo (2004), A Turtle’s Tale: Sammy’s Adventure and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (both 2012) among a host of others. Adventures in Zambezia (sometimes known as Zambezia) is no different and varies little in this regard; in fact it has a lot of similarities in both look and plot with the first and last of the aforementioned films to the point that it is almost like a meshing of the two.
The story is about a young falcon (voiced by Jeremy Suarez) who lives with his father (Samuel L. Jackson) on the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe near the Victoria Falls. He hears of the famed bird city paradise of Zambezia and literally leaves the nest to find it. There he finds that he must face a series of challenges and helps to become a part of the community. The story itself is so familiar that the film is difficult to get into because we have seen the same kind of film a hundred times before with more depth of character. All the birds and other animals are reduced to the normal stock ‘types’ one would expect in a family animated film. On the plus side the animation is colourful and beautiful for, as one of the documentary extras on the film puts it the animation of birds posed a number of animation challenges (which some of the aforementioned films also faced). The majority of the films production team is South African in a South African funded film who travelled to Hollywood to work on the finer aspects of the animation and filmmaking and, one assumes the voice work with such big Hollywood names as Jackson, Abigail Breslin, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy and Richard E. Grant. This is probably only the second mainstream South African film I have seen (the other being District 9). Sadly I lost interest in the film very early on because of the same old boring plot and characters with little development from better films, yet the CGI and animation is pretty first rate despite the lack of industry experience from most of the animators and crew who worked on this film.
There are a good selection of extras on the disc with each of the three documentaries running about 5 minutes each. It is often the case that for some DVDs the documentaries can be too long and over baked but here they are just right and cover various aspects of the film interviewing the director and scriptwriter as well as animators as they cover the inspiration behind the film including the location, the animation challenges and voice acting (which one tends to expect in extras for these kind of films). In addition there is also a video featuring scenes from the film and subtitled lyrics to the song in the film sung by Jewels Jaselle and Benji Heard, ‘Come Fly with Me’. Like the film it is the usual insipid stuff.
Chris Hick