“Monkey Kingdom”

The films released under the Walt Disney Company’s Disneynature banner have a recognizable formula by now: a famous narrator, a slew of eye-popping images captured by sparkling high-definition photography, adorable animals preferably in exotic locales, various bits of humor intended to humanize these foreign creatures and their eco-societies, and a forced cookie-cutter story with a predictably happy ending. Monkey Kingdom, the eighth Disneynature documentary, is no different on the surface: Tina Fey narrates this 81-minute story of a monkey on the low end of her troop’s food chain who is able to rise among the ranks and achieve success both for herself and for her baby son, to whom she gives birth during the first third of the picture. But Monkey Kingdom stumbles in attempting to fill out the length of a feature film by balancing two interconnected stories—one about motherhood and one about territorial aggression within this ecosystem—and doing so weakly.

Fey acquits herself far better than other Disneynature narrators like Tim Allen (who feebly narrated Chimpanzee) in terms of being moderately informative and funny—sometimes simultaneously—and specifies that Maya will be the “heroine of our story,” even if that ends up being not quite so true. Maya is a macaque monkey in Sri Lanka, living with her troop in an abandoned kingdom that’s been overrun by the jungle over time. For unspecified reasons, Maya is at the low rung of the totem pole; an easy visual example is a large fig tree, where the alpha male macaque and high-ranking females can climb to the top and eat the ripest food, whereas Maya has to stay on the ground foraging for scraps. Such is life for our heroine until a new arrival, Kumar, wanders in. He’s quickly exiled for behavior unbecoming a monkey of his stripe—mostly just flirting with females in front of the alpha—but not before impregnating Maya. She gives birth to a boy, called Kip, and after struggling for a time to make sure both of them are well-fed and protected, the entire group is under attack by a rival band of macaques. And, if the rival status of the new, combative gang wasn’t clear, they all appear to be physically scarred from prior interspecies battles, just so you know they’re tough cookies.

Although it’s true that Maya, in a very fairy-tale-like turnaround, ends up victorious at the end of Monkey Kingdom, it’s unfortunate that it comes without her being given much agency. Maya, of course, isn’t really a character in the traditional sense, but then, Monkey Kingdom’s director Mark Linfield, who also wrote the narration, invites such categorization by anthropomorphizing these monkeys and giving them names. And while there are other females in the troop, Maya is the only one who’s given a specific monkey moniker. The problems of Monkey Kingdom stem from the decision to position Maya as the protagonist without affording her any opportunity to be assert herself; even in a sequence where highborn monkeys essentially kidnap Kip, she doesn’t save him so much as happen upon him after Kip is discarded lazily.

Linfield’s other baffling decision is to introduce modern human civilization into the proceedings in the second half. Despite a handful of monumentally gorgeous establishing shots that seem to suggest this kingdom is far from the world of humans, the macaque troop soon descends upon a Sri Lankan city to recuperate from a fight and to stock up on cake, biscuits, etc. Monkey Kingdom may only run 81 minutes, but this section still feels awfully padded and aggrandizes humans. Even more obnoxious is a cheap gag wherein a man looks confused at his poor cell phone reception only to spot the monkeys atop a cell phone tower. Disneynature’s documentaries have proven to be exquisite to watch, but time and again, they falter, if not fail outright, at telling stories without getting in their own way. In that case, Monkey Kingdom fits right in.