O Gato da Floresta

This is a famous Walt Disney documentary, on the Amazon Rainforest and its Jaguar. I found that most of the scenes were edited to make a humanized appearance of the animals. In its day, this film was something special. Today it is historic to Disney lovers. Accustomed to watching the Discover Channel and Animal Planet, it appears hokey, much like John Ford's Battle of Midway. It contains some great footage that was either staged or edited to add character to this documentary. Disney must have wanted to portray animals as humans, there is a family of jaguars that are the main characters in this film. Seems to me that Reptiles are the bad guys in most of his documentaries. Human traits are the common thread in these Disney films, more about the human way of life applied to nature. All in all it is a historic film worth an hour of your time, even for a good laugh at the voice overs.

Saw this film back in the 60's, when I was around 8/9 years old, and I was very impressed by the amazing filming of two jaguars hunting together and tackling crocodile,anteater and anaconda. Back then such footage was very rare and this film became a top favourite of mine- 10/10 . But, as an adult I now believe that it must surely have been staged and, as jaguars are such hard to film creatures, then perhaps more than two animals were filmed and lots of smart cutting and editing used. But, still... 7/10...

I was a little surprised to see how low the rating for Walt Disney's Jungle Cat was. We are a little spoiled with the creation of shows like Planet Earth and the advancements in technology. In my opinion, for a film from 1959, Jungle Cat is a pretty cool documentary. In just over an hour, you are introduced to a number of different animals, and you get to observe quite a few unique situations. If you combined today's technology with the scenes that were captured in '59, I think you would have some much better viewer ratings. If you are a Disney history nerd, you've got to imagine Jungle Cat is exactly what Walt set out for in his nature films. Jungle Cat is well worth the watch (so long as you don't constantly compare it to Planet Earth).

Mainly because of diminishing returns, "Jungle Cat" was the last of Disney's "True-Life" feature length nature documentaries. Though I think another reason for that was that the makers of these movies had pretty much run out of techniques and tricks to really captivate the audience. Don't get me wrong, the documentary does educate, and some of the footage is fairly impressive. But even though the documentary is only seventy minutes in length, it often feels slow and sluggish. The movie seems to be repeating itself over and over. One reason for this may be that there is a significant lack of focus. Though the title of the documentary proclaims it is about the South American jungle cat, the movie keeps jumping back and forth from that subject to focus on other animals in the Brazilian rain forest. It might have worked slightly better had the movie given every focused animal a brief look, then jumped to another animal and not looked back. I realize I seem to be portraying this movie as being really bad. It really isn't; it could have been a lot worse. But all the same it eventually overstays its welcome.

Here we have another of Disney's wonderful True-Life adventures. This one concentrates on the wildlife of the Amazonian rain forest. It concentrates on the jaguar.

Although the cats are beautiful creatures, I found the slow-motion images of birds more engrossing, particularly the flock of flamingos taking off.

Although the Disney series is often called out for its faked footage and trained animals, they were instrumental in nurturing a love of wildlife in the 1950s and 1960s, and certainly no worse than TV shows like WILD Kingdom, in which Marlon Perkins would tell its audience "While Jim wrestles the tiger, he's a message from Mutual of Omaha." Did their life insurance policies cover mauling by jaguars?