chimpanzee

At a few West Coast theaters this Friday, Diane Keaton’s dog weepie Darling Companion and the documentary Chimpanzee will make room in the theatrical line-up for one more animal movie, the docufiction Otter 501. That’s right. While the rest of the world was distracted by the latest superhero shawarma scandal, the rapidly growing field of wildlife documentaries produced a transmedia movie in a genre you might have never heard of. About otters. And in a few weeks, this spring’s primates, canines, and water weasels will migrate to the DVD shelf, replaced by their summer counterparts in Madagascar 3, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and Piranha 3DD. There will, in other words, always be a creature feature at the movie theater.

Animals have always been celluloid stars: the Lumière brothers exhibited short films of horses and cats years before the first feature-length film. But the last few years have seen a flood (or is that an ark?) of animal movies. The wildlife doc, for example, is the industry’s newest success story. For example, Disneynature, founded only in 2008, has released four of the top ten highest-grossing documentaries of all time. The interest in looking at animals certainly seems limitless: the popularity of pet videos on YouTube, cable channels like Animal Planet and National Geographic, high-profile docs like March of the Penguins and Project Nim, and the 101 talking animal movies Hollywood released last year certainly attests to that. But while many of the animals on smaller-scale media like television and Internet videos are simply recorded and presented as they exist, the narrative requirements of feature films — a three-act story spanning 90-120 minutes — force movie animals to relate to humans so that we can identify with them…