The Meerkats Review

If you've grown up with the great tradition of British TV documentary-making over the last 30 years or so, where doyen Sir David Attenborough looms large imparting credible, serious knowledge, something like The Meerkats is a bit of a shock to the system. Like the 'True-Life Adventures' made by Disney in the 1950s and 1960s, it's a nature film where a narrative, not knowledge, is the primary concern. And anthropomorphism runs riot. This is unsurprising, however, given that the biggest commercial success in recent years in the nature film category was March Of The Penguins, which insisted on applying human emotion and sentiment to animals whose lives were ruled by instinct.

The producers of The Meerkats, which is a co-production between BBC Films and The Weinstein Company, presumably looked at the natural world and chose an animal that is both profoundly cute and which lives in social groups that can be described in easy-to-relate-to, human terms. The result is a film that's lean on informative material, and high on child-friendly story-book narrative, as written by Alexander McCall Smith ('The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency') and read out in the elder statesman tones of Paul Newman in a recording made shortly before his death in 2008.

The film, which is directed by James Honeybourne (a former Attenborough collaborator on such venerable strands as 'Wildlife On One') certainly looks gorgeous, and achieves some awesome footage. The camera tracks, in close-up, the face of a Martial Eagle ("meerkat enemy number one") in flight, or follows a Cape Cobra ("one of the deadliest snakes in Africa") as its prowls the tunnels of the meerkat burrow, then finds itself surrounded by the whole furry clan. Meerkats are related to the mongoose - but this titbit is about as informatively factual as the documentary gets. Instead, The Meerkats follows a meerkat pup, dubbed Kolo by the filmmakers, from the moment he first leaves the burrow to the point when he graduates to teacher for the next brood of pups.