Disneynature continues its April tradition of putting out a new documentary for families to enjoy together around Earth Day with the charming and engaging Orangutan. Filmmaker Mark Linfield, co-director Vanessa Berlowitz, and their crew of cinematographers, technicians, and advisors spent four years capturing the lives of some of humans’ closest animal relatives, building a story around one of them while allowing viewers a chance to experience nature up close and like never before. It’s a formula that the Disneynature team has stuck to for quite some time now, and the warm narration from Josh Gad is mostly there to keep the kids interested, but the overall experience of watching a film like Orangutan is still a transformative and immersive one.
Linfield documents the habits, behaviours, and instincts of orangutans living high in the treetops of Borneo and Sumatra, swinging from branch to branch and rarely ever touching the ground (because that’s where all their natural predators are). A story is constructed around a single, young female orangutan that’s named Indah, an adolescent on the verge of independence and adulthood. A young orangutan will spent approximately ten years in close proximity to their mother, and while Indah has approached that point, her eighteen month old younger brother, Bimo, is speeding up the process.
Orangutan does spend a lot of time watching as Indah adapts to life on her own, leaning how to use tools and picking up tips and tricks from other animals in the jungle. The other orangutans in the film are given their own personalities, trajectories, and stories, but never at the expense of creating falsehoods. The storytelling is merely a vehicle for creating connections between the young audience and the educational value of the material. There’s also plenty of room to explore the lives of other animals in and around the area that don’t get top billing, like the endangered and dangerous Sumatran Tiger, the adorable Sun Bear, various insects, and even the unassuming looking Slow Loris, the only venomous primate in the world.
There’s a fight between two alpha male orangutans that could frighten some younger viewers, and the social power structure of these animals (one that frequently leaves Indah, Bimo, and their mother, Diann, hungry) could be sad to behold, but Linfield and Berlowitz (two accomplished names in the field of nature documentaries) are able to temper some of the harsher realities of jungle life without sugar coating things. Orangutan belongs to a continually growing tradition of Disney producing such documentaries, and it often goes underrated and sometimes barely remarked upon outside of the Earth Day season. That’s a shame because films like Orangutan are a nice change of pace at any time of year.
Orangutan is now streaming on Disney+.
