The Animal Kingdom Storms Reality TV and the Documentary Industry

By Alicia Rebensdorf, AlterNet. Posted August 27, 2007.

Earlier this month, black and white billboard portraits of the family don were erected throughout New York City. They advertised a popular mob drama known for its sex, murder and conflicted loyalties. The caption: Tony's Out. Flowers' In. The third season of Animal Planet's Meerkat Manor was officially here.

But Flowers isn't the only furry film star that's in. Lapping at the success of movies March of the Penguins and Winged Migration, a wave of feature-length nature documentaries is coming soon to a theater near you. August saw the release of Arctic Tale, a touching story of a baby walrus' and polar bears' first year. It will be followed by The Elephants of the Okavango, the touching story of an eight-week-old elephant calf's journey through the desert. And there's also Turtle's Song, a touching story of a loggerhead turtle's journey from egg to ocean and Earth, which follows four migrating animals and their broods.

The upright, big-eyed Meerkats will have a big year. Following the success of the Meerkat Manor, both the BBC and the Discovery Network have feature-length Meerkat films in production. The cinematographer of Winged Migration is also at work on Les Animaux Amoreux. The subtle anthropomorphism of the French title is a bludgeon in its English translation: Animals in Love.

The cuddliness of these protagonists has inspired Desson Thomson of the Washington Post to name the trend the rise of the "fuzzumentary."

The name is equally descriptive, however, of the genre's blurring of traditional documentaries with Hollywoodized narratives. Arctic Tale used composite animals to create a fictional story of a polar cub it named Nanu and a walrus pup Seela. The Elephants of the Okavango publicity promotes the emotional range of its infant star, Jani, and Queen of the Kalahari, which is structured as a prequel to the Meerkat Manor series, is sure to follow the show's soap format with named cast members and telenova narration: "Finally, young Daisy tries to join the group unnoticed, but it's not going to work. She reeks of Carlos' aftershave. Despite her attempts to apologize, the group is confused and angry."

Though more overt than the TV documentaries from the Mutual of Omaha-sponsored Wild Kingdom series on Animal Planet, this is not an entirely new phenomenon. As Watching Wildlife author Cynthia Chris points out, while we tend to think of nature programming as unmediated, historically "wildlife film narration has ascribed to a fairly conservative set of ideological values." They portray the nuclear family as a firm social unit and cast those outside this unit as antagonists. Their girl-meets-boy narratives suggest universality on uniquely human social constructions. They also tend to favors species whose looks we can relate to and whose behavior can seem to match our own.

But this new genre, critics say, pushes that sort of moralizing even further. As Thomson writes, "Nature does not exist purely to entertain children. And these bears and walruses -- which would devour us if given half a chance -- are not fuzzy toys soft-shoe shuffling across a rapidly melting snow stage." Also, as exhibited in the fuss around the March of the Penguins, when some on the right lauded the bird's conservative values and progressives shot back with evidence of their one-season matrimony, these quasidocumentaries can manipulate animals' inherently apolitical behavior into powerful political agendas.

I was recently watching an episode of Meerkat Manor in which one of the females (they called her Tosca) had given birth to a litter of pups. The narrator, Sean Astin, who played one of the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, called her "the wayward daughter," and said the baby-daddy was likely from a rival Meerkat gang. According to his script, Tosca was kicked out of the den for reproducing without "her mother's permission." Never mind the question of just how a meerkat green lights a pregnancy, it seemed he stopped just short of calling her a slut. It might have been a little hypocritical to accuse others of anthropomorphism while I talked back to the TV, telling a certain hobbit he was a condescending prude. Still, I cared to remind: She's a meerkat. Getting knocked up is her primary purpose in life.

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Alicia Rebensdorf is a freelance writer and author of Chick Flick Road Kill: A Behind the Scenes Odyssey into Movie-Made America.