White Lion

Ugh.

Ughh.

Alright, from the description of the movie it made it seem like White Lion would be about a boy from a local village. The village wants to protect a local white lion from harm and pachers, as a white lion is rarer and more valuable. So this kid protects him / follows him living on the plains to ensure good health to the village, or something. THen eventually there are poachers and he has to stop them to protect the lion.

But that isn’t really what it is about.

This movie is a fake documentary…kinda. It is definitely 85% like a documentary, with an “authentic African” telling the tale. But he is also telling the tale to a group of kids and goes back to them frequently in the movie, interrupting the story. It is also fake. It is obvious when watching this movie they made the story, then went out to film it using their own lions in the wild. A normal documentary that would add a story to narration based on the events that occurred while filming, not create events (such as a “threatening fire” or being left from the pride, etc).

And it really bugged me. Normally with documentaries they are allowed to move at a lot slower pace. Just showing scenes of the lion growing up and music should be good enough. Every once in awhile narration, and that is all. But this took that same format, for fictional events. I don’t get the same feeling knowing that this, because it just feels like lazy story telling. This version is way different than the plot, because we expect a lot of human interaction with the animals, and don’t have to worry about the possibility of a boring area. Because we know its fiction, we assume it will be filmed like a normal movie.

Maybe I am the only one who would complain about something like this, but it just feels like both a forced and half-ass job movie. African Cats seems like a better movie because it adds a story to real great footage of cats in the wild. This is just real footage of trained cats in the wild, pretending to be a natural story. Sure it has its morals in line, like certain kinds of hunting being bad, but that is it.

Sometimes the narrator spoke for the few humans in the movie, sometimes they spoke themselves. That was off.

And it just seemed really really long, in the bad way.

The lack of realness is also distracting. I was too busy thinking “there is no way this is real” based off the things the lions did and the way they interacted with the few humans. Just. Ugh.

I don’t even know what is going on here.