Born in China (2016)

Film: Born in China (2016)
Stars: John Krasinski
Director: Lu Chuan
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I was on kind of a strange kick of nature documentaries over the holiday break, with Our Planet and Dynasties both watched in their entirety.  Since I was trying to prolong my vacation as much as possible, and because I wanted to start investigating the movies I'd bookmarked on Disney+, I went ahead and watched Born in China randomly.  I generally love nature documentaries, and while I haven't been as good as I used to be with seeing the DisneyNature films every year (it was for a while there an Earth Day tradition), I'm now attempting to finish all of the ones I'm missing on Disney+ as I'm nothing if not a cinematic completest.  Considering my adoration of pandas, I started with Born in China of the pictures.

The film, despite the marketing focusing almost exclusively on the giant panda, actually tells the tale of four different species of animals: a panda, a family of snow leopards, a golden snub-nosed monkey, and a herd of chiru.  The film follows these (wild) animals as they learn from their parents-there's clearly a parent-and-child message here that would feel just as at-home in something like The Lion King.  Along the way we learn the strength of family in the animal world, and perhaps get a hint that we're "not so different" when the animals onscreen behave similarly to what we'd expect from human children (getting into trouble, wanting independence, fighting with parents).

The movie is an odd juxtaposition to the Attenborough documentaries that I had been watching.  The BBC doesn't have a cute-and-cuddly animal mascot at its center, and its messages are more focused on education, not wanting to challenge the harshness of these animal creatures.  Attenborough's obsession with "eating and mating" isn't here at all; we do see some moments of a hawk hunting the animals, but that's about the scariest moment here, as even the impressive footage of the snow leopards feels coated in rose-colored glasses.  Instead we see nurturing and play take center stage.

This is probably fine for Disney, and maybe will inspire a future generation of young people devoted to environmentalism (if so, this movie would be a 5-star endeavor), but I feel like the film as a documentary or even a narrative feels cloying.  Krasinski's narration is too jocular, and too intent on making the animals seem "just like us."  Particularly with the monkeys, they put feelings and understandings on the young creatures that we just can't know about the animals, which feels dangerous since it gives the audience a faulty sense of science.  This was a valid criticism of Attenborough's Dynasties, but at least there the reality of nature wasn't totally erased.  Here, I feel like Disney goes as close to making these creatures animals in a story as they can without basically making them trained seals.