If only Chimpanzee, released by Disney under its Disneynature brand and opening this weekend, was half as exciting as its premise, trailer or press notes. As it is, the 78-minute movie, shot in three central African nations including the Ivory Coast, is a bit lacking in chimpanzees.
Oscar is the cute young chimp we meet and track and, besides a supposedly villainous rival chimp known here as “Scar,” footage focuses on Oscar’s mother and an alpha male surrogate parent. Other than that, the picture mostly gives us bugs, sticks, figs, mushrooms, lightning and treetops, often in slow motion or time lapse photography. That’s fine, and the daunting task of making this movie would probably make an involving movie unto itself, but it means that Chimpanzee does not exactly swing with chimpanzees.
It saunters, tracing Oscar’s chimp group through the jungle as they eat and sleep and, eventually, confront “Scar and his men,” a gang that narrator Tim Allen (Toy Story 3) repeatedly refers to as “thugs” or “enemies”. The anthropomorphism and Allen’s incessant narration, which tells what the pictures do not always show, are a steady drag on the rainforest-themed movie. Despite moments of humor and affection and a single drastic turn of events, the movie skimps on facts, such as the experts’ estimate that half of newborn chimps die before they reach the age of five, an astonishing estimate cited in the press notes, though, incredibly, not in the film. Other key facts – a chimpanzee’s height (between four and five and a half feet tall), weight (between 70 and 150 pounds) and life expectancy (between 40 and 50 years) – are also absent. Instead, most of the movie features chimps pounding nuts with stones, which affords Allen some good lines.
The family-friendly Chimpanzee is Disneynature’s (Earth, Oceans, African Cats) fourth generically-titled film released for the annual environmentalist event known as Earth Day and for each of its first-week moviegoers Disney says it will donate money through the studio’s ecology unit to primatologist Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee organization, the Jane Goodall Institute (a link to Disney’s group, the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund, goes to an ecology-themed page for DisneyWorld). Read and see more about Chimpanzee here.