Movie Thoughts: A Reindeer's Journey (2018)

 

• Released: December 21, 2018
  
• Directed by: Guillaume Maidatchevsky
• Running time: 1 h 26 min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A reindeer named Aïlo is born in Lapland and has to learn to survive in this harsh wilderness.

My Thoughts

This one got recommended to me by a colleague and wouldn't you know it I figured out how to rent a movie through Pathé for this. So here we go.

This is just a pretty straightforward documentary about the first year of a young reindeer's life. We see Aïlo's birth, how he learns to walk, how he grows, how he connects to his herd, how he meets other forest animals and how he evades his predators, the wolves. It's a well put-together documentary with some beautiful shots. 

That said, this documentary would have a higher rating if it wasn't for one element: the godawful narration. I'm talking about the Dutch dub here, I'm uncertain if this applies to other versions of the film. But that was the only one available to me to watch, so it's the one I'm talking about. The narrator is just...grating. Instead of choosing to have narration that appeals to all ages they specifically chose to give the narrator very pandering, childish lines. Which sure, makes the documentary simpler to digest for children, but wouldn't it be better to make your documentary as accessible as possible to all ages by giving it a more general narration that can appeal to any demographic? Instead of these super childish, cringe-worthy lines that kind of just ruin the documentary experience? 

The rest of the documentary was very good, though I do question if it isn't a staged documentary, in fact I'm pretty sure it is staged. Some of the shots were a little too good to be true and especially the wolves threw me off, because these look like they're wolfdogs and not pure wolves. They are close to resembling real wolves (not like using huskies or malamutes like some movies do), but they have very slim faces, large ears and defined facial markings which are all wolfdog traits. Also, at one point they refer (at least in the Dutch narration, this could be a translation hiccup) to what is obviously a rabbit as a hare. This could of course be a mistake in the translation, but it could also be that they couldn't get a hare for the documentary so they instead used a large brown rabbit to pass it off as one, like how they're trying to pass of the wolfdogs as pure wolves.

Overall it's a good documentary, and I sincerely hope the narration in the original/other dubs isn't as bad, but my Dutch version was pretty badly narrated and this documentary is very likely staged, at least in part.