Movie Thoughts: The Magic of the Leopard (2012)

 

• Released: January 1, 2012
  
• Directed by: Manuela Zips, Werner Zips
  
• Running time: 51 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

A documentary about wildlife tourism in Africa.

My Thoughts

My main thoughts for this documentary are very simple: It's a good movie, but it's not at all what I expected going in. Which is probably something I can't hold against it, but at the same time, with the title and poster indicating and depicting leopards, I feel I am allowed to be a bit disappointed that this isn't a documentary about leopards.

Sure, they do feature here and of course are one of the major wildlife attractions of Africa, being one of the Big Five, but you know. The rest of the documentary really just does focus on the people surrounding the animals.

And it was good, I was interested in these people they interviewed and learning about the history of ecotourism in Africa, and how these individuals are involved. It's just...not what I was looking for when I opened this up on Netflix, is all.

Still, the documentary is well-shot and the interviewees' stories are interesting. My main gripe for it honestly would be the music choices. There were a lot of songs as background music featured in this, and while they're not bad songs, they just didn't always fit with what was going on on screen or felt a bit distracting. Especially since there's quite a lot of them. I'd personally have picked more music without lyrics, or maybe used these songs more sparingly. They're relevant songs to Africa, but how they were used was a tad distracting.

Overall a decent documentary, though. Just...don't go in expecting to actually learn a lot about leopards like I wanted to.