Royal narration muscles into ‘Elephant’ spotlight

MOVIE REVIEW

“ELEPHANT”

Rated G. On Disney+.

Grade: B+

As big as they are, the mighty elephants on view in the Disney+ documentary “Elephant” take a back seat to the celebrity of our unseen narrator: Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.

The first in what is reportedly a multi-faceted deal with the studio for the American-born duchess, “Elephant” chronicles a nearly 1,000 mile, eight-month roundtrip African journey for a Kalahari elephant family.

“Where she leads, the herd follows, an epic, thousands of miles migration like their ancestors did,” the duchess says of the matriarch who leads.

The duchess is a constant presence, offering facts, history and excitable moments as if we’re gathered in a circle and being given vivid insights into this fascinating tale of survival against often incredible odds.

With a lilt in her voice and an absence of British intonational gravity, she offers a contrast to Sir David Attenborough and his nature documentaries.

Elephants immediately inspire awe and affection because they so clearly represent a link with our prehistoric past. These immense herbivores are like nothing else on the planet.

The Disney approach has always been to have the animals designated as familiar characters in a kid-friendly way.

In “Elephant,” we immediately learn that 50-year-old matriarch Gaia rules this tightly knit family.  Her 40-year-old sister, Shani, who has a 1-year-old son, Jomo, is second in command.

This epic journey requires immense wide-open spaces, a rarity in a continent being rapidly populated. Filming was done in Botswana and Zimbabwe; we never, ever see a human.

For the tribe to survive the journey, water is essential and it is up to its leader to determine the best route to find waterholes along the way. If she’s wrong, if the waterholes they visit are already dried up, they could all perish.

One remarkable, throat-clutching scene has a baby elephant become stuck in a waterhole that’s become dangerously cement-like as the water mixed with the mud and solidified.

The tiny calf is face first and suffocating, so the matriarch must use her trunk to remove the head and then somehow create a path for the little legs to be able to climb out of this death zone.

Along the way they face fearsome crocodiles, threatening lions who would eagerly dine on the calf and scavenging hyenas. They pass Victoria Falls, the Zambezi River. Another calf is born — and will not be left behind. This is a trek for the ages.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2UDDeBH