Michael Jackson and Bubbles: The Untold Story

Michael Jackson started getting weird with chimps before he evolved to spend time with little boys. This documentary tries to take the high road, to seeing Michael Jackson as some kind of complex, emotionally disturbed person who could relate better to animals than he could with people.

If you are a Michael Jackson fan, this is probably well worth watching, although you will be aware of some of the content before. I'm not a Michael Jackson fan myself, so I watched it with slight bemusement.

The documentary is more about Jackson than Bubbles, especially the star's childhood. It is not especially critical of him, but it points out that he had a difficult childhood (which we all knew anyway). The real draw here is Bubbles himself. I was aware of Jackson's pet chimp, but didn't know much about him. I didn't know for example that he could moon-walk. Animal trainers and simian psychologists talk about what Bubbles would have experienced and how he had to be moved away to chimp rescue when he was eight, because adult chimps are much stronger and more unpredictable LaToya Jackson takes up much of the documentary, as does Mark Lester, whose exact relationship to Jackson and his family is not clear.

On one level, it is sad what has happened to Bubbles, but at least now he is living a normal chimp life with others of his species. We get to see him and he looks very different. There are a lot of aspects of Bubbles' life which are not apparently mentioned here, like the hygiene problems that Jackson's household staff had to deal with. Or that Freddie Mercury refused to hirn with him in the room. And why is Jeff Koons' famous sculpture of Bubbles never mentioned?

By the way, the sound mixing in this is terrible. There were points where I was struggling to hear the narrator above the noise of the footage he was talking over.