A Pretty Short Thinkpiece on Wildlife Films

I was thirteen and still reeling from Michael Bay’s terrific ‘Transformers’ film, when the blinding heavenly light of David Attenborough’s ‘Life Of Mammals’ was televised on Channel 10. Having grown up with animals being synaptically linked to endorphins via Cadbury Yowie chocolate, I was always inclined to enjoy wildlife or its related topics. But sitting squarely in the middle of the age range written on the Transformers boxes (or maybe pretty far towards the oldest end) had made me susceptible to a rather distracting obsession as a 13-year-old. No longer. Dattenborough’s juicy mellifluity sliced right through all that nonsense. If taste was determined by eyeballs, scales would have fallen off those optically-inclined tongues.

Leaving aside the ambiguous meaning of my last sentence, it’s safe to say that the 10 or so weeks of watching BBC Earth explore mammal life on earth caused a pretty seismic shift in my interests. I had a few different ideas of what I’d like to do as an adult by that age, most of them pretty incompatible, like acting and mechanical engineering. But none were as vibrantly seizing (in the non-aneurism sense) as the realisation of passion that came out of watching a platypus swim between Davey A’s legs.

All this to say that wildlife films are a compelling and high-rating part of television, fed on, I believe, by something innate in us that has a curiosity toward natural history. Children especially have that tendency, apparently. I don’t normally take children with me into the forest so I wouldn’t know. Children are hard to get your hands on.

So who makes the best wildlife documentaries? BBC Earth. Hands down. Headed up for so long by the icon that is David Attenborough, BBC Earth achieved Hollywood scale filmmaking with stars that people had not only never heard about, but that weren’t even in the same genus as the viewers. And they did it classily: four-buttoned, bright orange tuxedoes and all. Compulsory viewing is ‘Life of Mammals’ (2002), ‘Planet Earth 1 & 2’ (2006 & 2016) and ‘The Hunt’ (2015), listed non-exhaustively, but exhaustingly watched in quick succession.

There are some excellent independent films as well. Often they are much more message- rather than science-communicative. Examples are ‘Blackfish’ (2013), ‘Virunga’ (2014) or ‘Blue’ (2017). If you’re a Letterboxd user, add those to your list if you want to pull chicks (advice given to me by a TAFE-certified chick-puller (does TAFE have certificates? Does TAFE even have printers?)).

On the American end, National Geographic does sensational work in many cases, especially as a magazine and organisation, but their films and programming can tend toward the nauseatingly melodramatic. To close this piece out thematically, I'll just say that I feel like Michael Bay needs to come to their production meetings and take back all the cocaine.

Elegance, innovation, international subject matter, and strong story make a good wildlife film. Experts say that to make that ‘good’ a ‘great’, you must compose all the music on a kazoo and a pair of rainsticks, then throw in crocodiles enjoying wilderbeest soup in the middle of a river, or failing that, any throwaway reference to Africa, including just playing the Shakira song. The fact that programming like Planet Earth exists is ample proof for the existence of a God. Athiests, if don’t you then get this unbelievable when Big Bang wouldn’t you like to didn’t think of that? CHECKFRIEND. TLDR;