The Leopard Son

The Leopard Son initially gives the appearance of being some half-breed offspring of The Lion King. Rather than a Disney cartoon, the film is a G-rated feature-length documentary that tracks the growth of a newborn leopard in the Serengeti over the course of his first two years of life. It represents the Discovery Channel's first entry into the realm of theatrical filmmaking (a new cross-pollinating marketing strategy also experimented with earlier this year in Nickelodeon's production of Harriet the Spy). The movie is a labor of love by award-winning filmmaker and naturalist Hugo van Lawick, who also shot most of the footage himself. Admittedly, the photography is stunning to observe, particularly the revealing close-up work that captures the animals au naturel. It's a special treat to see this kind of nature documentary on the big screen, though I suspect this larger format is also responsible for exposing some of the movie's shortcomings. The larger theatrical screen also seems to demand wider-angle shots than might seem necessary on television. The cross-cutting that occurs within particular scenes appears suspiciously disruptive of the continuity in a manner that would be less disconcerting on the smaller television screen. For the most part, The Leopard Son's attempt to present one cub's life in narrative form succeeds, although it's littered with numerous temporal gaps and is limited by the realities of what van Lawick managed to capture on film. For my taste, there's a bit too much of a humanizing element to the narration as van Lawick ponders the motivational and emotional triggers in the lives of the animals. And though the movie is quick to point out that death is part of the eat-or-get-eaten law of the wild, van Lawick shrewdly refrains from employing any of his close-up camerawork on the details of the kill. Sir John Gielgud narrates the frequently clunky prose with all the exaggerated expressiveness of a librarian at children's story hour. The dramatic music that floods the Serengeti is by Stewart Copeland. Although the movie ends with the promise of romance as the leopard encounters a young female cub whose “voice could pour honey into the heart of any Leopard Son,” the documentary prudently hangs on to its G-rating and concludes before sexual maturity sets in.