So some of you may know about my project to watch all the films that were or have been or will be released by Walt Disney Studios and this is certainly one of them. It's part of a documentary series called True Life Adventures, which uses footage that was filmed in Africa in a 30-month period. It's a documentary about lions mostly, but it does focus on other animals in Africa. There are two main reasons to watch this film and two main reasons to avoid it. Well, maybe three reasons, to watch it and one reason to avoid it. The first reason is if you want to watch all Disney films this is certainly a Disney film, so you should watch it, although there's no animation or anything that really makes it a Disney film. The second reason to watch it is connected to the reason not to watch it, it's a nature documentary from 1954 so that's about 70 years ago. I'm sure we have learned more about nature than we knew back then and some of the ideas presented in the film are either wrong or out of date, and I'm not a biologist, so I can't tell you what is presented that is out of date. But it's an interesting experience to watch a documentary from the 1950s about nature, it's not really something you do every day. I think the way that we present documentaries and nature Documentaries has changed and evolved and maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, but this is certainly an interesting experience to see what was presented to the audience as a nature documentary at that time. The other main reason to watch this film is that the narrator is so mean to his subjects. There's a great line where he says something, the lions are just lying around, and it's hot-they're not doing anything. They're sleeping in the hot African sun and the narrator says "the African Lion is the laziest animal alive" I thought to myself wow that's pretty harsh criticism coming there from the narrator. Then there's another section because it's not just about lions but like African animals generally, and so he's talking about leopards and how they hunt and how they wait for prey to go under their tree, and then they'll drop from the tree and attack them. He's describing the wildebeest who are going in one direction, and he says the wildebeest is a stupid animal (because it's walking into this trap) It's just so great because narrators never give their opinion like that in modern documentaries. I mean, I'm sure it wasn't the narrator's opinion, it was in the script, but you never have a documentary where nowadays where the narrator just doesn't like the subject at all. Those are great moments so check it out if you want to be a Disney completist you can watch it but if not you are really not missing anything.
Review of The African Lion
