African Cats

Directors Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey tell (or invent) the story of two feline families in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve: On one side of the river, a pride of lions, focusing on an aging lioness and her female cub; on the other, a “single mother” cheetah and her five cubs (soon reduced to three by predatory hyenas). The directors anthropomorphize the cats to within an inch of their natural lives, giving them names and reading their thoughts, an unnecessary embellishment to the fascinating nature photography. An over-reliance on slow motion gives the movie a sluggish pace, while the often overwrought narration (no writer credited) gets a melodramatic reading by Samuel L. Jackson. Comparison with Disney’s 1955 doc The African Lion is hard to avoid, and not always to this one’s advantage.