‘AFRICAN CATS’Rating: G.Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes
Earth Day becomes Mother’s Day in “African Cats,” a magnificent new wildlife documentary from Disneynature. It’s an engrossing and often moving film built around the fierce protect-my-young instincts of a lioness and a female cheetah struggling against the odds on the Kenyan Masai Mara savanna.
Almost every shot is a postcard-perfect African vista, and every animal shown in majestic close-up – lions, cheetahs, hyenas and aardvarks – even the homely wildebeest, their snouts covered in flies.
And yes, almost every situation and story thread duplicates what National Geographic did with its March documentary, “The Last Lions.” But it’s not a put-down of the darker and more straightforward “Last Lions” to suggest “Cats” is to “Lions” what poetry is to prose.
Music, image and narration combine in the Disney film to present life and death, up close (and yet almost bloodless), capturing a world where man isn’t yet the biggest threat – other lions and everybody’s favorite monster, the crocodiles, are.