Anyone looking for the next "African Cats" should check out Disney's real-life animal documentary "Bears," set to release this Friday. By the reviews I checked, it's about as good as the genre gets.
Really, the industry should dream up a new category name for movies like "Bears" and "African Cats" (which I was obsessed with for a small period of my life). The two aren't really documentaries, as they're currently being called. Documentaries are typically less fluid than the scenes captured in "Cats" (and I'm assuming "Bears" is shot in the same way). They require organizing material to make a point, whereas animal movies follow a group of cats, dogs, or in this case, bears, and simply attempt to interpret their behavior.
One of the only points of criticism from reviewers at the Visalia Times-Delta supports and doesn't support "Bears" and others like it as films deserving of their own genre. For the latter, they called "Bears" lacking in the "fortuitous plot turns found in previous Disney documentaries, resulting in some awkward (and possibly deceptive) editing." Thus, it seems as if the movie, like most documentaries, required more manipulation than usual, and slightly less observation. In "African Cats," for example, there are several climactic scenes -- a fight between rival lion clans, the difficult abandonment of a sickly female lion, cheetah kittens (if that is the term for them) defending themselves against hyeneas and other cheetahs -- so thrilling and perfectly timed the movie didn't need to do much else but simply explain what was happening from a scientific perspective.
For evidence behind the notion of animals movies as their own film genre, the scenes in "Bears," seem to be just as breathtaking as those in "Cats" and others. Narrated by John C. Reilly ("Step Brothers," many more), the film also makes an effort to interpret animal behavior -- sometimes a little too much, according to Visalia Times-Delta.
The era of high quality animal documentaries like "Bears" and "African Cats" is only just beginning (next up is a movie about monkeys called "Monkey Kingdom). All that is left is a suitable name.
