I’m writing this high—this review of a kids’ movie, no less—because it’s 4:23 p.m. on April 20, which is “the day all Americans are required to be high on marijuana,” according to Stranger associate editor David Schmader. But I’m on deadline and haven’t a lick to say about this movie because it’s so unremarkably dull. And it occurred to me: Disneynature’s African Cats might have seemed, actually, quite exhilarating if I’d gotten stoned before seeing it.
I really don’t want to rag on this movie. It’s a perfectly swell movie. (“Swell,” for the record, is a fantastic adjective for belittling something without sounding like an asshole. Unless you admit you’re being sarcastic. Then you do sound like an asshole, the way I must sound like an asshole right now. [I learned this trick from my mom, who disses ugly dudes by saying in her Australian lilt, “He’s a nice man.” But she doesn’t sound like an asshole. Have I mentioned that I’m stoned?]) It’s just that we’ve all seen this movie about enormous cats in Africa before. Like a hundred times before. When it was on television.
The thing is, animal behavior hasn’t changed much since we first started stalking them in the wild with video cameras. The way a cheetah sprints after a delicious gazelle, for instance, or how predators and prey poke about the savannah for food. It’s always the same Cycle of Life in the Wild™. And a sizable stock of American television broadcasting hours has been devoted to a PBS-style account of celebrity animals (like elephants and hippos and lions) doing their thing for the last five decades.
Baby cheetahs cavorting in grass, check. Baby cheetahs drenched in a rainstorm, check. Baby cheetahs consumed by hyenas, check. Baby cheetahs growing into adult cheetahs that have more baby cheetahs (which are also consumed by hyenas). Check.
Perhaps sensing that viewers had become exhausted with this animasociological formula, television’s primary fauna documenter, Animal Planet, changed its format on February 3, 2008. Explained by the trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable, this manifested in programs with “less voice-of-God narration and more visceral imagery and sounds.” It continued, “Think of it as swapping a drab narrator saying that a lion is about to kill its prey for the blood-curdling scream of the doomed creature as it meets its demise.” (Emphasis mine)
Two months and 18 days later, Disney launched independent film label Disneynature. Everything that Animal Planet had eschewed—soporific narration, predictable narrative, lions—is everything that Disneynature would embrace. For example, African Cats. African Cats concerns two feline matriarchs, one being a ladylion and the other a womancheetah, on opposing sides of a nameless river in a never-identified region of Africa. Lacking even a PBS-level of frankness about nature’s cruelty, the film employs narrator Samuel L. Jackson to calmly inform us when a hungry lion is about to kill its prey. Most of the gore, however, is sequestered safely off camera. Even death is granted a sort of heartwarming Disney twist.
African Cats is a perfectly fine composition and maintains the tradition of those hoary old nature documentaries. If you’re looking for an uncomplicated, sterilized account of feline life somewhere in or near Kenya, this is it. But don’t expect anything new. African Cats moves slowly (perhaps too slowly for young children), and the script is as uninspired as the title “African Cats.”
If you’re not a kid, maybe get stoned first. 
