Monkey Kingdom mimics Disney magic

By Katherine Monk

Those crazy monkeys: They have a hierarchy about who gets to sit at the top of the tree, who gets to sit in the sunshine, and who has to be a slave to the others. They will also all eat cake – when they can get it.

Staring into their expressive eyes and taking in the contours of their tiny hands, it’s impossible to deny our connection to other primate species, even one as foreign as the macaque monkey.

The subject of Disney’s latest nature spectacular, Monkey Kingdom, macaques are like the teddy bears of primates, which explains why they’re the organ grinder’s monkey of choice.

Cute, prone to cuddle and full of personality, macaques also make a great subject for a sweet family movie with a hint of natural wonder, and that’s exactly what Monkey Kingdom is: An accessible, entertaining and visually evocative documentary that chronicles the lives of a macaque troop in South Asia.

We can credit director-cinematographers Mark Linfield (Chimpanzee) and Alastair Fothergill (Blue Planet) for the incredible pictures, which take us to places Homo Sapiens rarely get a chance to see with such clarity, let alone the comfort of a soft-seat theatre. We climb high into the canopy and swim under the water alongside our tree-dwelling characters, but Disney is never satisfied with the simple, silent observation of animals in their natural habitat.

For nature to fit into the DisneyCorp. catalogue, it needs a little vest and cap, and a tin cup. For this cute, entertaining, and hopefully profitable angle they turn to top-notch talents Tina Fey, and the group of monkeys called ‘the temple troop.’

Fey’s combination of deadpan delivery, comic timing and deep sympathy for all things goofy keeps the narrative part of the film swinging from scene to scene in nimble fashion, but it’s the monkeys who rule this kingdom.

A tightly knit group that calls a craggy rock formation and its big fig tree home, the macaques we meet immediately feel familiar – and just a little haunting. The males have broad, pale, mask-like faces while the females’ facial pigmentation has the ruddy look of a regular drinker.

Add oriental instrumentation and it could pass for monkey kabuki because the drama is entirely archetypal: Our heroine, Maya, is a low-ranking female. Forced to sit on the ground, where she feeds off scraps tossed by the higher-ups, Maya is the Cinderella of this story – one that even features villainous sisters.

Maya seems resigned to her fate in the opening frames as she allows various members of the clan to poke and prod, some even steal food from her mouth, but she sits there, stoically, without a hint of protest.

For human viewers, such transgressions in the realms of personal space and ‘fairness’ will immediately make Maya sympathetic. But what’s more interesting is that she never feels pathetic, despite residing at the bottom of the social order.

Animals are incapable of self-pity because they are not cluttered by ego. In Maya’s world, everything is what it is, until something changes – which happens frequently. Weather, food shortages, power struggles and barbarian invasions are a fact of life and the film doesn’t turn away from these. One of the more poignant scenes features troop members quietly sitting around the dead body of one of their own, softly touching the still fur.

The filmmakers never show us the kill, thank goodness. They barely even show the body, but they do show us the rival gang and its fearless leader, an alpha male with half a lip and giant scars, and that’s more than enough because even though this is a documentary, it reads like the Lion King.

Maya has a chance encounter with a rogue male named Kumar, “15 pounds of hunky monkey,” but she ends up a struggling single mom after her Prince Charming is purged as a threat. Forced to care for her infant son alone, Maya proves more resourceful than your average monkey and finds food where others fear to tread.

The funniest scene in the film features the monkeys raiding a kids’ birthday party and stuffing cake, crackers, and anything remotely edible into their jowls before hightailing it out the window.

It’s like the food fight scene from Animal House, only funnier – and far smarter – because the whole endeavour is voiced by Tina Fey, who brings her quiet brand of insightful sarcasm to the storytelling.

She never oversells a line, nor does she let her own persona step on the characters’ screen presence. Behind every second of narration, we can feel Fey’s deep respect for these creatures, their way of life and their threatened Sri Lankan habitat (a portion of opening week receipts will go toward conservation), and it makes an impression.

Fey’s humour and humanity force us to recognize our inner monkey, and the simple things that make us truly happy, such as eating birthday cake, and sitting on a sunny branch surrounded by the ones we love.

THE ex-press.ca

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