'Tiger' and 'Tigers on the Rise' Review: Mothers Are Not Afraid

How tigers roam through the forests of India -- and co-exist with cities -- in two new documentaries on Disney Plus.

Now Streaming: In the 1960s, I watched Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color every Sunday evening on our family's black-and-white (?!) television, often in the company of my older brother and younger sister, with my parents hoving around the house. 

It was there that I caught my first early glimpses, I believe, of Disney's True-Life Adventures series of documentary shorts and feature films, which were produced during from 1948-1960. As I recall, I was enchanted with the nature segments of the two-hour Disney show, which always got my week off to a good start. 

After a long absence from the nature doc game, Disneynature was founded in 2008. Since then, their documentaries have been made by a variety of filmmakers, narrated by celebrity voices, and honored the True-Life Adventures tradition by assigning human names to animals. The latter point can quickly become cloying for adults; perhaps children like it more?  

The documentaries were released in movie theaters in the past, but its latest is releasing  exclusively on Disney Plus in the U.S., which is a shame, really, because the gorgeous photography fairly well cries out to be seen on the largest screen possible. (To make up for this, I sat very close to my television to watch the online screeners that Disney publicity kindly made available to me in advance.) 

Directed by Mark Linfield, and co-directed by Vanessa Berlowitz and Rob Sullivan, Tiger is a remarkable film that follows a young tigress as she raises her offspring in a forest in India. Narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, the film revolving among three narrative lines. 

The primary narrative thread follow the tigress, called Ambar, hunts for food, stalking prey with nearly the entire animal kingdom aware of her presence and ready to sound the alarm when she is sighted. It is a lonely, solitary pursuit, with the singular goal of survival by killing an animal and dragging it off to eat it, kinda like a fast-food restaurant with a very, very long line to order. 

The sub-plot involves Ambar's offspring, four cubs, two male and two female, who grow up quickly, but are initially consumed with the main occupations of all infants: sleeping and playing. The other sub-plot follows the male tiger who recently ascended to the throne as king of the local tiger group, vanquishing the father of Ambar's cubs. He is likely to kill and eat the cubs to quelch any potential rivals, so Ambar works hard to keep their existence a secret. 

All this is shot in high definition, and so the pictures look magnificent in 4K, if you are so equipped. Watching Ambar stalking her prey, her stripes and her stealth make it easy to understand why she is able to keep hunting. Every animal knows that the tiger rules the land, making the deer, for example, especially cautious and putting them on guard, ready to run whenever another sounds an alarm. 

The documentary points out that every species has a means to defend itself, and that all are ready to sound an alarm for their kind about the tiger. In turn, other animals are alerted, so that a monkey, for example, may see the tiger first and sound a warning for its mates, which other animals then can understand so that they, too, are put on alert. 

It is a quickly absorbing film. The anthropomorphizing, which initially feels a bit cloying, becomes very helpful in distinguishing the cubs, as well as the adult tigers, and inspires empathy for the animals. Brief scenes, that are really like asides in a book, bring attention to creatures like the adorable frogs, who sometimes climb atop the back of a fierce predator so they can more easily catch flies that are attracted to the napping animal. 

The filmmaking team captures many marvelous moments and are edited into a story with a beginning, middle, and end, all contributing to make Tiger a very good film. [Disney Plus]

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As I watched Tiger, I kept wondering: how did they get that shot? (Example: the male tiger naps in a small cave; the camera captures him sleeping and stretching from behind.)

Directed by Rob Sullivan, and co-directed by Alistair Tones, Tigers on the Rise answers that question, but goes beyond that, too, in order to place the film into context in modern India. 

Running 77 minutes, the film spends its first 15 minutes or so as a behind-the-scenes doc on the making of the Tiger feature, before expanding its focus. The behind-the-scenes footage reveals the crew's empathy for the animals and their shared desire to be respectful to the family they were documenting. 

As noted in the feature, after dipping dangerously low, the tiger population has more than doubled in India in recent years. That's good news, of course, but that means that the increased population needs more protected grounds to order to survive, which is especially concerning to the humans who live near the areas where tigers live in the wild. 

Narrated by Blair Underwood, Tigers on the Rise proceeds to explain what solutions have been propounded by tiger experts, and which possible solutions have proven to be, surprisingly, helpful. For example, I'd never imagine that painting eyes onto the rear ends of cows would have any effect on tigers, but the tigers have evidently been fooled into thinking that the painted eyes are watching them, so they stay away or change their areas to stalk for food. 

It's all quite interesting to watch, and makes for a good companion to Tiger, especially for adults who are curious about, not only the making of the film, but also the much larger issue of how tigers can coexist with human in the modern world. [Disney Plus]