Look, elephants are great. I’ve never met an elephant, but I love them all anyway. I want them to survive and thrive and do all their elephant things for millennia to come. People who poach elephants are monsters, and the people who help preserve their natural habitats are saviors. I am very pro-elephant. That said: did I watch the new DisneyNature documentary Elephant (streaming on April 3) for the love of elephants? I gotta be honest, I didn’t.
I watched the new DisneyNature documentary Elephant—which is, as the title suggests, about an elephant—because of its narrator. The film, a cloying and not terribly scientific but still compelling look at one herd of elephants making their way from the Okavango Delta to the Zambezi River and back again, was must-watch for me because one Meghan Markle, billed as Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is the person telling its story. Meghan Markle narrated a nature documentary, you guys! Isn’t that crazy??
Well, she was an actor before she married international ginger idol Prince Harry, second grandson of Queen Elizabeth—so narrating a documentary isn’t totally out of her ken. But Markle had mostly forsaken her old life to marry into the British royal family before she and Harry suddenly yanked themselves out of it, so her involvement in this film was a bit of a surprise. A pleasant surprise, though. Markle is an engaging narrator, a warming voice of omniscience who gives lively shape to a story that’s . . . well, true in the purest sense, though given a heavy zhuzh by the Disney machine.
Having never seen a DisneyNature documentary before, I was initially thrown by the cutesy tone of Elephant. I had, perhaps dumbly, been expecting something more along the lines of Planet Earth, narrated with dreamy authority by the likes of David Attenborough or Sigourney Weaver, or Life, given voice by Oprah Winfrey. So when Markle’s sing-song delivery began, I thought at first she was doing a terrible job. But then I realized that this was just how the movie was supposed to sound, soothing and playful, for the benefit of the children meant to be watching it. Once I acclimated to that reality, Markle proved just the right fit for this story of tenacious elephants.
The film—directed by Mark Linfield, Vanessa Berlowitz, and Alastair Fothergill—concerns a family of elephants who live in the Kalahari Desert, making yearly migrations from a flooded river delta to the edge of Victoria Falls, an endless cycle of chasing water that seems pretty exhausting. The film lets you feel that ache in every closeup of a weary elephant eye, every pan across cracked gray skin. It doesn’t shy away from the harshness of nature’s rule, but it does find—or, create—as much brightness as it can elsewhere.
Quite unlike a more serious nature documentary would, Elephant names its subjects. Our protagonist is Jomo, the young elephant son of Shani, second in command of a herd. (Her older sister, Gaia, is the matriarch.) There’s lots of talk of succession in the documentary, a funny bit of meta irony considering Markle’s place in a very scrutinized human dynastic drama. At one point Markle says, “The matriarch is a force to be reckoned with,” and there’s no doubt she knows what she’s talking about. Anyway! The movie heavily anthropomorphizes Jomo and his compatriots, which is probably not the most responsible thing to do from, like, a zoological perspective. But it helps the filmmakers wring some human-esque drama out of this process of fast and feeding. We adults might find it ridiculous, and somewhat counterproductive to the understanding of animal behavior, when the film imbues its subjects with human motivations for things that have been simply edited into reality. But I’m sure those storylines will keep little ones engaged. Which is the whole point. Many a young elephant advocate will be christened by this film.