The only thing keeping this movie up is the subject matter. No matter what watching this you will enjoy the up close relationship that is developed throughout between the Chimpanzees and the audience. The downfall of the documentary is in the narration. Unfortunately, Tim Allen was a complete flop. If you love nature docs and love David Attenborough and other natural world docs that feature a narrator that is able to tune in to the documentary and thereby have the audience fully enticed and watching with awe and excitement. Instead of this, you are left feeling is this a joke? The side narration 'giving the chimps a voice' was at first, intriguing... I wanted to see how Allen would go with it. Sadly... He didn't - Instead he sounded like he didn't want to be reading out the script he had been given. Which leaves the viewer not buying it. I just can't believe no one listened through and thought it didn't sound right! Anybody could have sounded better than that! Allen had no enthusiasm except possibly when he was talking about tools.BUT the subject matter is the key. If you have children then I'm sure it will be a nice close up look at nature for them. However, because it is aimed at children it has seemingly been dumbed down. This is an unfortunate inevitability when producing documentaries for children. I would not recommend paying to see this in the cinema. Instead watch some David Attenborough, or wait for 'Chimpanzee' to come on TV.

Or how to cash by getting people all emotional with a story that never happened...Nothing new you say? True, but whats intriguing is the director's emphasizing of this movie being a documentary. While it is not.Christophe Boesch, director of the Department of Primatology of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and also the founder and president of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation, worked for the film crew as an expert consultant during the filming.What he now revealed in an interview with the SPIEGEL may cause a severe degree of disillusion. WARNING: If you plan on a cinema-adventure of watery eyes and emotional sympathy you may want to turn a blind eye on what is about to follow.To put it short: basically the whole story is made up.Starting of with the star of "Chimpanzee", Oscar. Oh, he is so cuddly! And all of his 4 brothers too! Yep, it is not even the same little fella you see romping about, but 5 different animals that were used for his part. One of the reasons might be, that Oscar died after 7 months of the adoption, as most adopted chimpanzees do.His "mother" did not die in a fight with another monkey tribe. And there is a pretty good reason for that. This fight never happened in the first place, the two groups never even met. The animals "fighting" belong actually to two different species that do not even live in the same natural habitat. They live in different parts of the planet, which is why the scenes are - for the aware eye noticeably - cut together from pictures that were taken over the years, all over the world. So what did Oscar's "mother" die of? Pretty undramatically of a splenic fever.And which part of the whole story is actually true you ask? The adoption. This however is fairly common between chimpanzees, and in a time where most of the web community has seen videos of dogs adapting pretty much anything from tigers to hamsters not really worth an evening to the cinemas.

Tim Allen narrates the story of Oscar, a young chimpanzee, who is raised by his loving mother, Isha. They live in a large extended family and the little chimp gradually learns to find food and use tools. All is idyllic until a rival chimp tribe decides to invade their territory.The photography is very enjoyable but Tim Allen was a poor choice for narrator with his tool references and grunting. He nearly ruined the film for me. His voice is too casual and low-brow. I wish they had used Morgan Freeman instead.The soap opera storyline was overdone. In most cases, it seemed the animals were photographed randomly and the scenes were forced into a rather forced plot. For example, there is much drama about a big battle between the two chimp bands, but all we see is animals running through the forest for reasons unknown; there is no actual contact.Definitely not up to Disney standards.

I work as a wildlife cameraman - but (sadly) was not involved in this film. When I watched it I realised a new bench mark has been set for these wildlife feature movies. Anyone who has worked in West Africa will agree it is one of the toughest habitats to film in - and chimps can be one of the hardest animals to follow. With that in mind, the achievement of getting a unique true story like this - one that brings us so close to the animals in every way - is quite remarkable. I don't want to put in spoilers, but the story is heartwarming and the characters so strong that you could almost believe this was animated - but it is much better than that. This is true life. A beautiful movie!