Movie Thoughts: Tiger (2024)

• Released: March 13, 2024
  
• Directed by: Mark Linfield, Vanessa Berlowitz, Rob Sullivan
• Running time: 1h 30min
• Rating 4/5

Synopsis

Documentary about a mother tigress and her cubs.

My Thoughts

I don't have too much to say on this one, so I'll keep things brief.

Overall Tiger is a wonderful outing and another strong installment in the Disneynature series. This documentary is beautifully shot and evokes emotions and wonder in the viewer. I loved following Ambar and her three cubs on their journey of life.

If I do have a few complaints, it's mostly regarding the predictability of the documentary. While overall this is a wonderful film, by now I've seen this story so often in other documentaries, even about other animals. It's so often about a mother animal and their young that it gets a bit stale after a while. While I think Tiger is a great execution of this concept, it doesn't change the fact that it's a pretty exhausted story-line in documentaries by now. What if they focused more on a young male tiger for once? Just a thought.

Also I think it's a bit sad that Ambar's story is left inconclusive. Out of the three cubs which survive, their stories are all tied up with a neat bow on top. We see them as adults, one of them with her own family now. But Ambar just kind of vanishes from the picture once her cubs separate from her, which is sad because Ambar was the main character up until this point. Leaving her story inconclusive just feels a bit empty. Even if they didn't have any footage, the narrator still could've told us a conclusion of her story. Right now it just ends with "her cubs separated from her, and Ambar and this one male are now partnered. She may have more cubs in the future". But we don't see her after that which is just sad. Even if she did die in the time skip between her cubs leaving her and being fully fledged adults, I think the audience still deserves to know because right now she just vanishes from the epilogue.

Overall still a fantastic film, however, but these two criticisms do hold me back from giving it an even higher score.