WORLD TOUR Day 46 - Kenya
BEFORE: I might have been shown this film as a small boy, but I don't remember a thing about it, so I'm counting it as unseen, until now. This is my final stop in Africa, this time I made it across a continent in just three days/movies. Linking from "Gorillas in the Mist", Bryan Brown was also in a film called "Parker" with Ingrid Pitt, who was also in "Octopussy" with Geoffrey Keen.
THE PLOT: Joy Adamson and her husband, Kenya game warden George Adamson, raise Elsa, a lion cub. When Elsa approaches maturity, Joy determines she must re-educate Elsa to living in the wild so that the lioness can return to a free life.
AFTER: Well, this reinforces some of the things I said last night about animals, and animal activists. I maintain that some animals are perfect for domestication, and others aren't - case in point, lions. The Adamsons raise three lion cubs essentially as pets, then have to re-train one of them to live in the wild. Seems to me they could have saved some time just by raising the lion to be, you know, a lion.
But of course they gain joy by having such a majestic lion live with them, and that's where I start to question their motives. Who's to say which animals are majestic and which aren't? The lions are perceived to be attractive - but isn't beauty arbitrary or subjective? They train Elsa to kill her own food, starting with warthogs. Well, who speaks up for the warthogs of the world? Why does a lion deserve to survive and a warthog doesn't? Are we paying respect to the natural food chain here, or are we giving favoritism to the "beautiful" animals?
When the Adamsons cannot care for Elsa any more, they train her to live in the wild, since they can't bear the thought of sending her to live in a zoo. Why? Wasn't that good enough for her two siblings? Instead of training her to be a killer, it seems the zoo would be a good fit for her, because the zookeepers would feed her every day, no re-training required. Plus, what zoo wouldn't want a nearly-domesticated lion, to cut down on the dangers of dealing with a savage one?
Plus, if Elsa were in a zoo, the Adamsons could at least visit her regularly, as opposed to releasing her into the wild, and possibly never seeing her again. So, I don't really follow the logic here, except that I've taken in stray cats, and after they learn to live indoors, I can't really see releasing them outside again, especially after I've become attached to them. But those cats aren't lions, though they may think of themselves as such.
This is based on a true story, but obviously events were recreated for the film, and I'm pretty wary of this sort of thing where animals are concerned. The old Disney nature documentaries from the 1950's are notorious for faking footage - to get the shot of a mountain goat stumbling and falling from a great height, they didn't film for days to get that footage - the goat was likely pushed by an off-screen helper. The quite untrue urban legend about lemmings mindlessly jumping off cliffs came from the 1958 Disney film "White Wilderness", so I don't even want to think about how many innocent lemmings died from being needlessly hurled from a cliff to get that footage.
So, logically, they probably used domesticated lions to make this film, for the safety of the actors, and the whole point of the film is that domesticating lions is not really what's best for them. I can't get past that irony. And to get footage of lions fighting each other, they probably didn't find that occuring naturally, I bet they took tame lions and taught them to fight, which seems pretty low. The film probably did a lot to advance the cause of conservationism, but does the end justify the means?
My major complaint against the film is the theme song - it's fine on its own (though WAY too likely to get stuck in one's head) but was completely overused for instrumentals throughout the whole film. Every single piece of incidental music was based on that same tune, which was stale after about 10 minutes.
Also starring Virginia McKenna, Bill Travers.
DISTANCE TRAVELED TODAY: 504 miles / 812 km (Mt. Karisimbi, Rwanda to Nairobi, Kenya)
DISTANCE TRAVELED SO FAR: 17,161 miles / 27,620 km
RATING: 4 out of 10 zebra carcasses
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