Jungle Cat

I was a little surprised to see how low the rating for Walt Disney's Jungle Cat was. We are a little spoiled with the creation of shows like Planet Earth and the advancements in technology. In my opinion, for a film from 1959, Jungle Cat is a pretty cool documentary. In just over an hour, you are introduced to a number of different animals, and you get to observe quite a few unique situations. If you combined today's technology with the scenes that were captured in '59, I think you would have some much better viewer ratings. If you are a Disney history nerd, you've got to imagine Jungle Cat is exactly what Walt set out for in his nature films. Jungle Cat is well worth the watch (so long as you don't constantly compare it to Planet Earth).

Saw this film back in the 60's, when I was around 8/9 years old, and I was very impressed by the amazing filming of two jaguars hunting together and tackling crocodile,anteater and anaconda. Back then such footage was very rare and this film became a top favourite of mine- 10/10 . But, as an adult I now believe that it must surely have been staged and, as jaguars are such hard to film creatures, then perhaps more than two animals were filmed and lots of smart cutting and editing used. But, still... 7/10...

Mainly because of diminishing returns, "Jungle Cat" was the last of Disney's "True-Life" feature length nature documentaries. Though I think another reason for that was that the makers of these movies had pretty much run out of techniques and tricks to really captivate the audience. Don't get me wrong, the documentary does educate, and some of the footage is fairly impressive. But even though the documentary is only seventy minutes in length, it often feels slow and sluggish. The movie seems to be repeating itself over and over. One reason for this may be that there is a significant lack of focus. Though the title of the documentary proclaims it is about the South American jungle cat, the movie keeps jumping back and forth from that subject to focus on other animals in the Brazilian rain forest. It might have worked slightly better had the movie given every focused animal a brief look, then jumped to another animal and not looked back. I realize I seem to be portraying this movie as being really bad. It really isn't; it could have been a lot worse. But all the same it eventually overstays its welcome.

This is the last of Disney's A TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE Feature. It follows a female jaguar in the Amazon as well as the wild life world she comes in contact with. There's the wild Iguazu Falls before it's over-run by tourists. The sloth is endearing and a real eye-opener back then. The lengthy battle between the jaguar and the anaconda is epic.

This is an old style nature film. Disney has been called out for manipulating footage. Certainly, they humanized the animals to make them relateable. It's an old fashion concept. Old photographs of Civil War battlefields were manipulated as much as these films. It was another era. While one can talk about some of these deficiencies, one also cannot deny the wide-spread appeal of these films and its influence on nature-conservation.

Very cute, I have recently caught love for these documentaries about the biosphere, here a very fluffy and brasuca example, the Amazon Forest ecosystem, as main characters a beautiful and wonderful Jaguar family, affectionately called cats, we learn from them, about them, and we tasted beautiful images, in love with sloths, a magnificent documented report...