An editing task as big as an elephant
The story of two elephants making their way through the wild to find their lost (probably permanently lost — if you get my drift) mother is touching. Elephant Tales is clearly made for a young demographic. When you put this Bambi-esque situation into perspective, it’s a sad, but neat concept. You get some giraffes and monkeys involved with it, it makes it even cuter.
First, the positives. The movie had to be tough to pull-off. Why? Consider this, there were no CG effects in the film. No animated mouths attached to the animals, nothing but voice-overs. Next, you have animals in their natural environment trying to work around each other. Trained or not, it has to be difficult for them to do stories with live animals and get them to react a certain way. Sometimes it was dead on (when the two elephants were talking to each other whilst one was caged) and other times when the animals seemed to improvise (when you have one elephant chasing after another to try to stop them from going into the African wasteland). This must have been an editing nightmare. I’m impressed with the choice to voice-over the animals and try to piece together, through the magic of editing, a coherent story that makes some sense. I applaud the filmmakers for that. I also think that the animals were cute and very kid friendly, which is great when you’re going for that ‘G’ audience.
Now, the negatives. I think the voice-over work is a bit too much. I do understand that this is probably a low-budget movie, but you have to get very good VO folks to represent the animals well. I’m not sure they did that in the film. The younger elephant is suppose to be a younger brother, he’s clearly got a girl’s voice. I can forgive for that, but kids probably will get slightly confused. Also, the movie is about 45 minutes too long. I think the filmmakers were trying to stretch a short story into a feature length film. 96 minutes of this is tiring and, according to my daughters’ reactions, enough to bore a child. My kids love Disney films and previous releases like Alvin and the Chipmunks, so I know they can handle this length of film. It was the content, not the timing, that was the problem.
So, while I didn’t particularly enjoy this film, it could be something light for a very young audience. Again, they may get bored about 45 minutes into it, but it might be enough to sustain their attention.
An Elephant graveyard for features
I think the feature would have been better had there been special features with it. I would have loved to hear about the process of how they made this work. Would have loved to meet the VO folks and the editor. Regretfully, nothing was included on this DVD. That’s sad considering what effort probably went into making it.