Movie Thoughts: Duma (2005)

• Released: 27 May 2005
  
• Directed by: Caroll Ballard
  
• Running time: 1 h 40 min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A boy goes on a journey to return the cheetah he raised as a pet into the African wilderness, guided by a hardened drifter.

My Thoughts

Honestly a pretty standard movie for its type. You know, the whole "kid befriends/raises a wild animal and has to return it into the wild" type of deal. I've looked at several movies with this plot before, such as Mia and the White Lion, Silver Wolf and Flight of the White Wolf. I'm usually pretty neutral on this type of movie. While I do love animals, the live-action ones that don't rely on CGI often have a bit of questionable animal ethics going on (children interacting freely with wild animals) and they tend to just be kinda mid when it comes to quality. There's also the whole fact that 99% of the time, releasing a human-reared animal back into the wild it'll just die because it doesn't know how to hunt or socialize with its kind. 

But Duma is a pretty neat execution of this type of movie. It's not fantastic, but I had a good time watching it. I honestly really liked the human characters as well. I liked Xan and especially his relationship with Ripkuna. The bond between Xan and Duma (the cheetah) was very nice as well. But I liked the one between our human leads the most because it's just very wholesome. Xan just lost his father and now literally goes alone into the African Savannah just to return his cheetah to where he was found. He can look after himself decently, but he's still a kid who makes mistakes and often ends up in trouble.

Then there's Ripkuna, a hardened drifter with a criminal past. The boy and he meet up, and at first they don't really get along and only help one another for the sake of not trying to die of exposure in the desert. Heck, Ripkuna even turns out to have bad intentions at one point. But over the course of the movie they bond and form a sort of surrogate father-son bond, which is just very wholesome as Xan was depressed after his father's death (especially when they threatened to take away his best friend, Duma, as well). And Ripkuna does have a blood-family he loves as well. That's just honestly his main goal in this movie: to get home to them and provide for them. That's just wholesome stuff, and honestly the bond between the boy and the cheetah starts to pale in comparison a bit when the relationships between human characters are written much better than that between the boy and the titular cheetah.

There was obviously a lot of questionable interactions in this movie between the cheetah and the boy. Tame or not, a wild animal is still a wild animal. General rule of thumb when dealing with one is that if you wouldn't do something like this with them in the wild, you probably shouldn't be doing things like this with a tame one, either. They may be used to humans but that doesn't suddenly make them any less threatening. The boy frequently tussles with Duma, cuddles with him on his bed, etc. I'm not saying they never should've used a real cheetah; they could do that for the scenes where the boy and the cheetah don't directly interact. But let's just say that nowadays I'd prefer if people would use CGI or practical effects such as animatronics for any direct human-animal contact. Both safer for the human and the animal.

But that said, the movie itself was still good and pretty heartfelt. While I do think that the wholesome bond between our human leads somewhat overshadows that between Xan and Duma, it's still a solid film. 

(Though I do think it's pretty funny that one of the cheetahs they got to play Duma has a massive scar across its face. Which results in this scar appearing and vanishing across scenes as they used different animal actors).