I took Hanna and Ellie to see the Disney nature movie Chimpanzee on the weekend. I would have gone to see this movie alone as my interest in chimps stems way back to a crazy misunderstood neighbourhood lady who kept monkeys as pets.
Before the movie started, in those moments kids are frantically searching the grounds for leftover 3D glasses or the one in a million chance there’s a Werther’s candy in my purse, they showed taped interviews of kids being asked what their parents would do if they came home with a chimpanzee. The reply was unanimously, “My Mom would freak out!”
Not me, I have always secretly wanted a chimp. Not the kind that rip people’s faces off, the kind you dress up like a train engineer in your Cabbage Patch dolls’ striped overalls and tiny baseball cap that climbs up to fetch things from tall shelves and wants to give you long, furry hugs all day.
Here are a few suggestions to the filmmakers from our six year old, resident film critic.
1. Why don’t the monkeys wear nametags on their backs so we know who they’re talking about? Didn’t the people who made the movie think they all looked the same?
Like a professional sports team with jerseys.
2. Why would monkeys want to hurt other monkeys? Don’t they know they’re all monkeys? If I haven’t said it before, sometimes I wish she was in charge of everything. At the very least, a policy maker.
3. Why can’t the monkeys just share the trees and the food–there’s enough for everyone? It would be better if they used their energy to work together.
I love this utopian society she’s created. Instead, she caught a glimpse of “nature” edited down to 1 hour, twenty minutes and not nearly as raw as it could have been. There were a lot of tears, a lot of burying of heads in my lap, her knees, my purse, followed by a pause hoping she might find one of those giant tubs of buttery popcorn in there. She would have no luck, just receipts and seventeen pens, one of which works–intermittently.
She shook her hands frantically at one point in what I thought was a coping mechanism from some inner turmoil being depicted between two rival chimpanzee gangs onscreen. When I asked her if she was okay, she said, “Yes, I was sitting on my hands and now they feel like the fizzy water you drink.”
Perrier running through her veins is the modern day “pins and needles.” That works too.
Five stars.
