Delhi Safari - Reviews - Page 3

Confession: I didn't see The Lion King until very recently. When I heard that Simba's father Mufasa dies, I absolutely refused to watch it. Sunny Deol smashing the populous with a hand pump? No problem.

James Bond nuking a thousand baddies? All good. A big cat's death being plotted by hyenas? Hand me the tissues. As a die-hard animal lover, it is incredibly hard for me to handle any kind of fauna violence, no matter how badly animated it might be.

The 3D glasses hid my blurry eyes well while watching Delhi Safari because director Nikhil Advani goes all out to make his point. The wild inhabitants of Sanjay Gandhi National Park (don't you love the immediacy of the set up?) find their home besieged by builders constructing high-rise apartments.

Evil looking machinery (good artwork here!) tears up their land and a father-son duo of leopards is caught amidst the building site. Father saves the son, but at the cost of his own life as a worker shoots him with a gun.

A plot is hatched with the mother, an Englishman of a bear, a right-wing monkey with a rustic twang, and a domesticated talking parrot determined to get their message across to humans: don't destroy our home. Or as one of them puts it: "Insaan ko insaaniyat sikhana padega". Of course, they need to settle their own issues first.

Their quest takes them to Delhi and in between, they meet all sorts… Gujju flamingos, Himesh Reshammiya-inspired hyenas, and Axis Japan-inspired bees. All very imaginatively rendered. Somewhat inevitably Advani uses classic Hindi film dialogue and songs as a relatable context for the characters and the audience.

Even though the target audience is kids, Advani doesn't talk down to them. This is one of those rare instances of a children's film - animated or not - that respects its audience. You find this in the way the characters are voiced, the subtle jokes that kids wouldn't get in the first go. I mean, Pixar does that sort of thing. And I've heard far more juvenile jokes in 'A' rated films.

What Pixar doesn't do, of course, is songs. And save for one 2D hand-animated effort that breaks away from the style of the rest of the film, one wonders if we need to force fit this Bollywood legacy of the lip-sync into our cutting edge animated stories as well.

Akshaye Khanna is the pick of the voices as Alex, the multi-lingual parrot with an attitude. Boman Irani and Govinda bring alive Bagoo the bear and Bajrangi the monkey nicely too.

Even though you can clearly see the story's inspirations in films like The Lion King and Avatar this is a universal theme that needs and uses cinema (and not the other way round) to constantly remind the public that we share our planet with other species. Side note: as convenient it is to make them the bad guys, I wish hyenas weren't always discriminated against. Anyway, take the kids - find some if you don't have any of your own - and enjoy Delhi Safari. It's been worth the wait.