Chimpanzee (2012)

This is the second nature documentary from Disney that I've seen, and like the other one I saw, it's a mixed bag. On the positive side, it is very well photographed, with some spectacular shots (especially on Blu- ray). It's also not boring, and there are some interesting revelations on the lives of chimpanzees and what they have to go through.Unfortunately, at the same time this documentary has some serious flaws. Most obvious is the narration by Tim Allen, which is often very annoying and jokey. I realize that they were trying to attract kids, but I think Disney could have found a narrator that would appeal to both kids and their parents (and written better things to say.) Also, the events that we get to see sometimes come across like they were concocted in the editing room. It was not a surprise when I read other user comments here after watching the movie that gave evidence that this documentary wasn't always telling the truth as to what actually happened.There is some good stuff here, but adults will probably have some issues with "Chimpanzee" all the same. So it's best to show it to your kids while you are out of the room doing something else.

The only thing keeping this movie up is the subject matter. No matter what watching this you will enjoy the up close relationship that is developed throughout between the Chimpanzees and the audience. The downfall of the documentary is in the narration. Unfortunately, Tim Allen was a complete flop. If you love nature docs and love David Attenborough and other natural world docs that feature a narrator that is able to tune in to the documentary and thereby have the audience fully enticed and watching with awe and excitement. Instead of this, you are left feeling is this a joke? The side narration 'giving the chimps a voice' was at first, intriguing... I wanted to see how Allen would go with it. Sadly... He didn't - Instead he sounded like he didn't want to be reading out the script he had been given. Which leaves the viewer not buying it. I just can't believe no one listened through and thought it didn't sound right! Anybody could have sounded better than that! Allen had no enthusiasm except possibly when he was talking about tools.BUT the subject matter is the key. If you have children then I'm sure it will be a nice close up look at nature for them. However, because it is aimed at children it has seemingly been dumbed down. This is an unfortunate inevitability when producing documentaries for children. I would not recommend paying to see this in the cinema. Instead watch some David Attenborough, or wait for 'Chimpanzee' to come on TV.

Or how to cash by getting people all emotional with a story that never happened...Nothing new you say? True, but whats intriguing is the director's emphasizing of this movie being a documentary. While it is not.Christophe Boesch, director of the Department of Primatology of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and also the founder and president of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation, worked for the film crew as an expert consultant during the filming.What he now revealed in an interview with the SPIEGEL may cause a severe degree of disillusion. WARNING: If you plan on a cinema-adventure of watery eyes and emotional sympathy you may want to turn a blind eye on what is about to follow.To put it short: basically the whole story is made up.Starting of with the star of "Chimpanzee", Oscar. Oh, he is so cuddly! And all of his 4 brothers too! Yep, it is not even the same little fella you see romping about, but 5 different animals that were used for his part. One of the reasons might be, that Oscar died after 7 months of the adoption, as most adopted chimpanzees do.His "mother" did not die in a fight with another monkey tribe. And there is a pretty good reason for that. This fight never happened in the first place, the two groups never even met. The animals "fighting" belong actually to two different species that do not even live in the same natural habitat. They live in different parts of the planet, which is why the scenes are - for the aware eye noticeably - cut together from pictures that were taken over the years, all over the world. So what did Oscar's "mother" die of? Pretty undramatically of a splenic fever.And which part of the whole story is actually true you ask? The adoption. This however is fairly common between chimpanzees, and in a time where most of the web community has seen videos of dogs adapting pretty much anything from tigers to hamsters not really worth an evening to the cinemas.

21 minutes and 33 seconds into the film and I was done.What seemed to be a very interesting and potentially engaging documentary about the life of a Chimpanzee turned out to be a film that seems to be have been made for children as the main audience. The music is childish and Tim Allen's voice-over becomes excruciating pretty quickly. Nothing interesting really happens - well, at-least not for the first 20 minutes.)We've seen it all before countless times on National Geographic and Discovery. There's no new content in Chimpanzee that would make me want to watch this for 1 hour and 18 minutes.Cool, if you're going to watch it with your children but not recommended for serious adult viewing. You may come out rather disappointed and quite frankly, annoyed.