Disney

Monkeys! Things I Learned from Watching Disney’s Monkey Kingdom

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

This past weekend, we brought Sprout to his first movie in a theater. It was in the mid-60s and predicted to rain, but I also wanted to get out of the house. It was just the right day for going to the movies. While there are few movies I would show him at this age, we were in luck. Last week, Disney released the latest in their Earth Day Disney Nature series – Monkey Kingdom. I figured if there was any movie that would hold his attention, it was this one. Besides, we were fully prepared to leave the theater if he got too antsy. As he was enthralled for the first 45 minutes, we all got to pay close attention to that section. Here are a few things I learned while watching:

My kid really likes monkeys.
I already knew this one, but I couldn’t predict exactly how many times he would say the word “monkey!” during the movie. At least 30 or 40, although I wasn’t counting. Thankfully, there were only about 10 other people in the theater, none of them sitting close to us. Chris said there was another kid with running commentary as well, although I didn’t hear them. It helped that the the sound was really loud.

The city the movie is set in is real and looks awesome.
The movie focuses on a group of monkeys in Polonnaruwa, an abandoned ancient city in Sri Lanka. The scenery is spectacular, with monkeys swinging from natural rock formations, giant trees, and intricately carved buildings. The coolest part is that Polonnaruwa is a real place, designated as a UNESCO Cultural Heritage site. The movie doesn’t even show some of the most striking statues, intricately carved and full of evocative details in their clothes and headdresses. I’ll probably never get to visit, but damn, the Wikipedia article alone made me want to.

Macaque monkeys provide a great illustration of privilege.
The movie focuses on Maya, a lower-class macaque monkey. Macaques have a very specific, strict and regimented social structure. The top monkeys – the alpha male and his primary females – get the best food, sleeping places, and protection from predators. Because class position is inherited, their kids are extremely privileged as well. They get to climb all over the lower-class adult monkeys, even when they’re trying to sleep. Whether they want to or not, the low-class monkeys are forced to be defacto babysitters for the royalty. The movie’s explanation of the system was a great elementary description of privilege that I think could spark some really interesting conversations with older kids. (Especially if you ignored the rest of the plot. More on that later.)

By Kalyan Varma GFDL 1.2, GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Kalyan Varma GFDL 1.2, GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Baby macaques are seriously ugly-cute.
They’re super-wrinkly and almost completely bald except a little patch of old-man hair on the tops of their heads. Only other monkeys and people who think naked mole rats are cute could think baby macaques are.

Disney’s dislike of non-conventionally attractive people extends to monkeys as well.
Except for the babies – which obviously get a pass – every monkey with a disfigurement or a striking facial feature was a villain. Props to Chris for pointing this out. He also made the valid point that much of the “showdown” between the two monkey tribes was just the result of clever editing. The scarred monkey that was presented as the head of the warring tribe was probably from the same group as the heroine.

Nature documentaries are a great way to teach media awareness.
I remember being absolutely shocked the first time I realized nature documentaries are often staged. I maintained my naïveté about that particular subject for a pathetically long time – at least until high school. And those were “Planet Earth” type of movies, with straight-forward facts over vibrant, amazing images. “Documentaries” like Monkey Kingdom that have a plot and specific characters require the filmmakers to play even faster and looser with “what really happens in the wild.” One part of the movie claims that a number of traumatic events happen to our protagonist in a single day, when it probably took months to shoot. Similarly, some people have suggested that the main character and her “love interest” are never on screen simultaneously, their romance a result of clever editing. While Sprout isn’t old enough, discussing how nature filmmakers can use selected footage and editing to create or suggest events that never happened is an excellent lead-in to broader discussions into how the media does or doesn’t cover news. The idea that the media can distort the news or leave out major parts is challenging to consider, but nature documentaries offer a fuzzy and gentle introduction.

Disney seriously made a film about monkeys into a princess movie.
A key part of media awareness is being able to read the unsaid or implied messages in a story. Disney’s message in Monkey Kingdom – and I am not exagurrating at all – is that if you are poor, you can wait for your Prince Charming to come and overthrow the king. Seriously. The low-born monkey has a love interest come in from another group, the love interest takes over after the monkey King loses his position during a conflict, and Maya, her baby, and her monkey prince live happily ever after. Tina Fey does a good job narrating and the story is cute, but also pretty inane. Fortunately, the imagery and footage was so engaging that it was easy to forgive the silliness.

If you’re a toddler, movie theater seats are really fun.
The movie was so engaging that Sprout was captivated for a good 45 minutes – about 2/3 of the running time. After that point, he wanted to move around a little. As he clambered off my lap, I let him sit in the seat next to me. Not being a toddler myself, I underestimated both how little he would be in comparison to the giant seat and how much he could move the it up and down with his body weight. Thankfully, this new diversion was both quiet and pretty darn entertaining for him.

Letting a toddler walk up or down stairs in a movie theater in the dark is a terrible idea.
Unfortunately, playing on the movie theater seat didn’t last the entire movie. No, his next task to conquer was crawling up the stairs. Again, I figured it was quiet and relatively harmless. I parked myself on the stairs and planned to give chase if he went too far. Unfortunately, he didn’t get far at all. As he pulled himself up the third step and I glanced at the screen, I heard a wail. He had slipped, crumpled in a toddler-shaped pile. I scooped him up and hustled outside, trying to minimize both his pain and everyone else’s exposure to it. After a few minutes of calming down, we went back into the theater. Then, because I’m a brilliant, forward-thinking mom, I let him try to walk down the stairs. Of course, he fell again. Thankfully, it wasn’t as hard and the movie was pretty much over anyway.

What was the first movie in a theater you brought your kid to or that you remember as a kid? How did it go?

A Bear of Very Little Brain but a Lot of Heart

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

When the weather outside is frightful, I’m more willing than usual to bend the rules. While we normally don’t allow Sprout to watch videos – I’d just rather him be outside, looking at a book, or engaging in creative play – I actually suggested an exception a week and a half ago. It was freezing rain, there was a winter storm advisory and there wasn’t anything better in the world to do but snuggle on the couch and watch a movie. So that’s precisely what we did, turning on 1977’s The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

We picked that particular movie after a rather strange exploration of the Netflix app’s children’s section. Of course, I fully expected there to be a number of inane films, such as Peabody and Mr. Sherman and Cars’ Tall Tales. Then there were a bunch of children’s films that are excellent, but still too old for a toddler, like The Lion King and Spirited Away. What surprised me was how many obviously adult – many R-rated – films were showing up, from Top Gun to Barbarella to Annie Hall. Also, the fact that “Crime TV Shows” is a category in “Kids” at all. I don’t know if someone is screwing with the Netflix algorithm or what, but don’t trust that section to be accurate!

I hadn’t seen this particular version of Winnie the Pooh since I was little, but I’ve had a lifelong fondness for the stories. My mom nicknamed my dad Pooh Bear in college and have a number of Pooh Bear Christmas ornaments. They sang me Loggins and Messina’s House at Pooh Corner as a child and now I sing it to Sprout in both the most joyful and desperate hours. Sprout also has a plaque with the famous quote from Christopher Robin to Pooh about believing in yourself that my mother-in-law originally gave my husband. Needless to say, I was looking forward to sharing these beloved characters with him.

Sprout thought it was fantastic. He laughed multiple times, mostly at appropriate moments. He giggled at Pooh falling out of a tree and spitting out bees in his hapless attempt to steal honey. He also laughed at the part where Rabbit starts hallucinating because he’s terribly lost in the woods, but I told him it wasn’t appropriate to laugh at someone being scared. He probably just thought the imagery was weird, but I don’t want to reinforce that reaction.

Besides what he laughed at, how he laughed was particularly striking. It was a tinny, almost stilted laugh that was different from his usual one. Chris pointed out that this was one of the few occasions he’s had to laugh “at” something rather than “with” someone. Usually when he’s laughing, it’s because we’re tickling him or doing something funny together. It was odd to see how much his laugh varied depending on the situation.

Sprout wasn’t the only one laughing though – both Chris and I enjoyed it quite a bit. While I remembered bits and pieces from before, there were a number of things I had forgotten:

1) How hallucinatory it is: Besides the sequence with Rabbit, there’s also a very trippy part where Pooh imagines Woozles and Heffalumps taunting him. It’s obviously influenced by Fantasia, with multi-colored dancing, spacey elephants and lithe, morphing weasels. For some reason, it also reminded me of the dream sequence in the Big Lebowski, but maybe that’s just because I love that movie. Jeff Bridges would make a very interesting Pooh Bear though.

2) How many jokes for adults there are: It’s easy to think that having jokes for adults in children’s movies was invented by Pixar and Dreamworks, but Winnie the Pooh had its share of them, most adopted straight from the original stories. From the fact that Pooh Bear quite literally “lives under the name of Sanders” with the sign “Mr Sanders” above his house to Owl clearly being based on some boring Cambridge don, there are a wealth of jokes only adults will get.

3) How deeply annoying Tigger is and how other characters react: Tigger is straight-up obnoxious. He bounces in with no warning, yells at other characters, often destroys their stuff, and abruptly leaves, never with any apologies. Now, many children’s characters could be described as “deeply annoying,” but what’s fascinating about Winnie the Pooh is how they explicitly acknowledge that within the text. Tigger’s behavior absolutely pisses off Rabbit and even frustrates ever-patient, kind Piglet. It’s so bad that in a secret community meeting, Rabbit convinces Piglet to help him lose Tigger in the woods! It’s a pretty awful thing to do, even to someone who is highly inconsiderate.

4) How much the stories are about the challenges of building a community, especially when the “people” in it are flawed: Thr conflict with Tigger is fundamentally about an outsider coming in who doesn’t mesh with the current community. Tigger, Rabbit, Piglet and Pooh all behave poorly and face a variety of consequences for it. Because it is a children’s story, they all learn a lesson at the end and get along, but it isn’t so easy as just a quick fix. While both the outsider and the community chooses to adjust their behavior and expectations to serve the greater good, the story definitely suggests that this is going to be an ongoing struggle for Tigger and Rabbit. Similarly, a story where Owl’s house is destroyed in a big storm is about the sacrifices we make for the people we love. While the storm continues to rain and rain, Eeyore searches for a new home for Owl. Finally, Eeyore announces he has found the perfect house, which Owl declares he loves. The only problem is that it’s already Piglet’s house. Saddened by giving up his house, but wanting his friends to be happy, Piglet makes the sacrifice. Thankfully, Pooh turns it into a relatively happy ending by inviting Piglet to live with him, but it’s pretty obvious that Piglet is still sad about giving up his house. It’s this kind of struggling with real moral issues that really rekindled my love for the movie.

While I’m not against showing Sprout movies and TV shows in general, I do want to be picky about what I show him. Just like his books and bringing him out in nature, I want the pop culture he does consume to be kind, thoughtful, and creative. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh happily met all of my expectations and more.