Are animals in Hollywood films too human?

The simian star of new Disney film Chimpanzee is the latest animal to be portrayed as having human emotions. But does such anthropomorphism give a distorted view of nature?

You could say cinema and nature got off on the wrong foot, or paw, right from the start. In 1926, to much excitement, an adventurer named William Douglas Burden brought back two komodo dragons to New York's Bronx zoo – the first live specimens the western world had ever seen. Most of that excitement had been generated via a movie Burden had made depicting these semi-mythical reptiles in the Indonesian wild, voraciously devouring a wild boar. By comparison, the real, live komodo dragons were something of a disappointment. They just lay about lethargically in their cage, and died a few months later. It later transpired that Burden's film had been heavily edited and staged to amp up the drama. The dragons hadn't actually killed the boar; it had been put there by Burden as bait. The slow reality of nature was no match for the drama of the screen, it turned out. The science couldn't match the fiction. One of the first to learn this lesson was the film-maker Merian C Cooper. He went on to incorporate elements of Burden's Komodo expedition into a fictional movie: King Kong.

We have come a long way since Burden's day in many respects, but that tension between rigorous natural history and populist entertainment is still very much at work in the nature genre, especially now that it has migrated on to the big screen in a big way. Where once we flocked to see animals painted as man-eating monsters in the movies, Jaws-style, now we want to get closer to them, physically and spiritually. There could be several explanations. Maybe it's guilt at our destruction of their habitats, the proliferation of internet-related animal cuteness or because there are parents keen to give their children something more edifying than Iron Man 3. Or maybe it's just because we've got so much better at filming wildlife. Nature films are one place where all the technological advances of film-making really come into their own: high-definition, 3D, surround sound, lightweight cameras.

But while cinema has made all these advances, nature itself hasn't really got with the program. Unlike characters in Madagascar or The Lion King, real wild animals haven't learned to take direction any better than Burden's giant lizards. It can take years of uncomfortable, patient, expensive observation to gather enough footage for a feature-length documentary. And although it was common practice in the past, faking it is very much frowned upon. We like our wildlife cinema authentic, but we also want it exciting and dramatic, and that is still a challenge.The current solution to this dilemma can be seen this week in Chimpanzee, a new film by Disney, shot on location in the west African jungle. It's the story of Oscar, a young chimp whose mother, Isha, is killed as the result of an attack by a rival gang. Oscar struggles to cope on his own, but is then surprisingly adopted by Freddy, the dominant male of his group. The film's footage is unimpeachably authentic, painstakingly captured over three years, and often stunning to behold.

But that science/entertainment split still runs through Chimpanzee. It is directed by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, veterans of the BBC's distinguished Natural History unit, but instead of the soothing, informative tones of David Attenborough, the narrator here is Tim Allen, aka Buzz Lightyear, who strikes a rather different tone: cosy, child-friendly, often corny, and all but devoid of any scientific explanation. And it is anthropomorphised to a jarring degree. The chimps are given names and ascribed feelings and motivations. "Isha couldn't be happier with her new baby boy," Allen tells us. "Like most kids, Oscar hates bedtime." It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the plight of a cute, orphaned little chimp like Oscar. But it's clear that Chimpanzee and its ilk have strayed from the evolutionary path of nature documentary film-making. With their combination of intimate voyeurism, character drama and omniscient narration, modern nature films are coming to resemble reality television – albeit with subjects slightly higher up the evolutionary order.

But anthropomorphism is no longer a dirty word, argues Jean-François Camilleri, head of Disneynature: "Today, a lot of scientists are saying it's actually a mistake to be against anthropomorphism. There's a new philosophical current saying: 'Let's stop considering animals as just machines with no feelings, no emotion and no potential thinking process.' And chimps are a very good example."Chimpanzee was made with the advice of leading primatologists, he points out, including Christoph Boesch and Jane Goodall, both of whom have long argued for apes' emotional and cultural intelligence. "We can see clearly on the screen they have moments of emotion – laughter, anger," says Camilleri. "It would be a mistake to not take that into account."Disney has been at the forefront of wildlife cinema since the 1940s, when Walt himself created the True-Life Adventures series. It has won Oscars, although it took some notorious liberties in order to make its subjects more entertaining. None more so than 1958's White Wilderness, in which captive lemmings were herded off a cliff in order to support the myth that the creatures killed themselves en masse. Disneynature, established five years ago, is the successor to True-Life Adventures, and has set its sights firmly on the box office. Its first two features, Earth and Oceans, together took nearly $200m worldwide.

"We are not doing wildlife documentaries; we are doing films," says Camilleri. "And just like in any movie, what's always important is the foundation: the story. A good story has to have emotion, some laughter at some stage, you have to follow a character, and this character has to evolve. But our only goal is to show on screen the stories that nature gives us. We think that actually nature is a very, very strong screenwriter. Sometimes even stronger than human screenwriters."Even so, nature sometimes needs a little script editing. Chimpanzee is indeed a remarkable story in terms of animal behaviour, but as movie plots go, it's a very familiar one – especially to aficionados of Disney cartoons. Like Simba or Mowgli, Oscar takes a classic "hero's journey", overcoming obstacles before a climactic good-versus-evil showdown in which "teamwork" overcomes "brute force", we're told. The leader of the rival chimps even goes by the name of Scar, just like in The Lion King.

This formula – let's call it "enhanced natural narrative" – has been perfected over the past decade, not just by Disney but also big players such as National Geographic, Discovery and Imax. For an extra gloss of movie magic, celebrity actors are recruited: Morgan Freeman, Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig, Samuel L Jackson, Patrick Stewart, even Jeremy Irons – Scar himself! – narrated National Geographic's feature-length The Last Lions. Invariably in these films the visuals are scrupulously authentic, but the "message" is very much in line with the values of their human creators. Disneynature's African Cats, for example, frames its cheetah protagonist as a struggling "single mother" coping with five cubs (despite the fact that female cheetahs are generally solitary) and is crammed with eulogies to maternal love and courage. The Last Lions is almost identical, its tagline: "Witness the power of a mother's love." Even in flamingo documentary The Crimson Wing, natural predators such as hyenas and storks are coloured as "storybook witches".

In 2005, this tweaking of nature's screenwriting resulted in the bizarre phenomenon of conservative Christians getting behind the Oscar-winning March of the Penguins. The movie's emperor penguins were seized upon as symbols of godly virtue, due to their monogamous partnerships and selfless child-rearing in the face of Antarctic adversity. Church groups were even encouraged to screen the film, making it the second-highest grossing documentary of all time, despite the fact director Luc Jacquet rejected religious interpretations of his film as "intellectually dishonest", pointing out that the "divorce rate" among emperor penguins ran at 80 to 90%. What was perceived as altruistic "adoption" by the penguins was actually closer to "kidnapping", it transpired. And as for penguin homosexuality ...

Likewise with Chimpanzee, there are moments of violence, but we don't see much in the chimps' behaviour to counter the impression that they're basically as civilised as we are, and a darned sight cuddlier. Never mind that one natural history film-maker described chimpanzee sex to me as "basically gang rape" and likened young male chimps to football hooligans. Just last year, a researcher at Jane Goodall's primate sanctuary in South Africa suffered "multiple and severe bite wounds" after getting too close to a group of chimps and being dragged off. Mother chimps have been observed to murder and even eat other infant chimps. Given that these films must appeal as broadly as possible to recoup the expense, behaviour that goes against the family-centric grain tends not to make the cut. But is representing natural behaviour as similar to our own any more responsible than pushing lemmings off cliffs?

There's another strand of nature cinema, though, that's addressed the human presence in the equation head-on. With reference to chimpanzees, for example, James Marsh's Project Nim showed what happened when a Columbia University professor took anthropomorphism to its logical extreme by raising a chimp as if it were a human. It didn't turn out well, but as the film progressed, it became clear the problem was the people rather than the primate. After being passed around a succession of foster parents, Nim became difficult and aggressive – which, come to think of it, is just how any human child would respond.

Anthropomorphism was firmly slapped down, however, in Werner Herzog's fascinating Grizzly Man, a documentary assembled from the footage of a nature-freak who was mauled to death by the very bears he worshipped. The late Timothy Treadwell is so besotted with nature, he goes into raptures over the "gift" of a fresh bear turd in the movie, but Herzog dismisses his enthusiasm with memorable disdain. "What haunts me," he intones, "is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food." Disneynature's next big feature also happens to be about grizzly bears; one suspects Herzog won't be getting the call.

Another new film in this vein throws the anthropomorphism debate into fresh relief. Blackfish by Gabriella Cowperthwaite deals not with animals in the wild, but in captivity, namely killer whales at the SeaWorld chain of resorts in the southern US. These creatures are essentially coerced into performing entertaining tricks for the benefit of a public audience, but one whale has been linked to the deaths of three people. Free Willy it ain't.As the story progresses, ex-trainers express regret over the treatment of whales, and the lies they routinely trotted out about how "happy" the whales were. There is much sinister footage and gruesome description showing just what killer whales can do to humans if they feel like it.

Blackfish makes no attempt to anthropomorphise its whales and it doesn't need to. Like chimpanzees, they are evidently highly intelligent and social creatures, and they clearly don't like what SeaWorld is doing to them – which is in effect imprisoning and torturing them until they snap. Where once they roamed the open ocean, they are now confined to tiny pools, mothers are separated from their calves, and they are forced into unnatural, violent behaviour towards themselves and us. If anything, we empathise with the whales more than the humans because they're treated like animals. Does that mean they haven't been anthropomorphised enough?Like the other nature docs, Blackfish is a gripping movie, with drama and characters and emotion, but unlike them, it's one that reminds us how much of a gap there is between humans and animals, and between movies and reality, which often amounts to the same thing. Thanks to cinema, we're able to see nature better, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're any closer to it.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 541