When it comes to these DisneyNature documentaries, you have a basic idea of what you’re going to get: some genuinely breathtaking footage, a less rigorously scientific perspective and a large dose of kid-friendly anthropomorphism. At their best, which is probably Monkey Kingdom and the snow leopard section of Born in China, they achieve a kind of beautiful visual poetry and they emphasize the human-like elements of animal behavior without creating false equivalence. At their weakest, probably the monkey section of Born in China, they’re cutesy, cobbled together and imbue their animal protagonists with incredibly complex emotions like, and I’m not joking, disillusionment. Luckily Elephant is one of the good ones, probably my second favorite. This movie mostly follows a single elephant herd, and one mother with a new baby in particular, over the course of a year as they leave the Okavango Delta at the end of the rainy season, trek across the Kalahari Desert, following ancient migration paths, to the Zambezi River and then back again in time for the rainy season to reach the Delta again. Part of the reason this one works so well is because it has this structure of watching the herd essentially make a big circle over the course of a year while we’re also watching a baby elephant make his first one of these journeys. This movie does less forcing of an emotional journey on its characters, but, in part at least, this is because elephants really are some of the most fascinating animals on the planet; the documentary filmmakers don’t need to do a whole lot to make you feel emotional when one of the elephants dies on the long trip and the other elephants essentially file by in what can really only be seen as a mourning ritual of some kind. This stuff really happens and it fascinates me; I think elephants are among the most fully conscious non-human animals on the planet. Scenes of the elephants visiting the bones of their dead ancestors just make me kind of shake my head; there’s something here we don’t understand about these strange creatures. The narrator for these movies is always a celebrity of some kind and here it’s a pre-Oprah Duchess Meghan, so I guess I can finally say I’ve seen one of her movies. And, gotta be honest, she does a really good job; some people might find it too bland, but that’s what I like about – she isn’t kitsching it up like a lot of the other celebrity narrators do. It’s a reserved performance that, again, doesn’t lean to heavily into being wacky for the kids. Though I should say that, after all, these movies are for kids and, if the cost of getting kids into nature documentaries is that the documentaries have to sometimes be a little too cutesy for me, a thirty-eight year old guy, well, that’s fine. These documentaries really are quite strong overall; I don’t think I’ve seen one that I was overall negative on, but this one is better than average, one of the best of the series. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – DisneyNature doc has a more compelling subject and a more serious tone here than they often do; great visuals and a compelling story put this one near the top of the Disney heap. 3 ½ stars.