Freshly (and admiringly) gobsmacked w.the news — via tireless anti-attenborough activist dr vick — that the disney zoo is divided in four sectors, AFRICAWORLD, ASIAWORLD, DINOWORLD and MICKEY&MINNIEWORLD, i have to report that (as so often) the SOUNDTRACK (words and music) to planet earth operate entirely to damp down and defang the startling breathtaking weirdness of the visuals, to place us back in our wised-up quasi-scientific boxes…
i. as we watch a young crab-eating maquaque swimming, the evil recalibrator whispers “It’s almost as if he’s doing this JUST FOR FUN” (or similar) — animals in DA-world are programmed to gobble and fvck and THAT’S IT unless they’re little, in which the “instinct to play” is occasionally allowed.
ii. What we as so often saw was endless oodles of WTF footage, snipped together for maximum OMG (this is a GOOD THING), snidely scored and overvoiced down into explanationista category-dreariness: viz the MOST EXCELLENT PRAWN EVER which lives in the fast cold fresh waters of the upper reaches of the [ganges?], in the himalayas [i think, i may have blinked and miseed a sceneshift] [or more likely TURNED THE ANNOYING MUSIC DOWN and missed a scene-shift]: anyway its hands and mouth are fanned-out fine-mesh nets, and it stands braced against the tremendous current catching tiny blobs of food and ladling them into its mouth ALL THE TIME….
iii. the most awesomely abstract dance of death — old-skool crocodile-vs-wildebeest territory, but slowed down peckinpah style so that it became bulging yaut muscle and gouts of flung water, like an AB EX painting
iv. the waterfalls in brazil, a mile and a half across: all i could think wz, birds aside, who ever gets to sit on the little bits of rock BETWEEN the cataracts — i want to have a picnic there!!
v. midges that hatch and breed in clouds above lake malawi, as if patches of the lake had caught fire — they only live (like this) for one day!
vi. amazonian freshwater dolphins = VERY VERY UGLY
vii. and as we say farewell to the “wide serengeti” [insert actual real placename], flocks of birds too vast to count….
i think what i’m getting at is that the voiceover is a repressive desublimation compared to the near-hallucinatory content of the images, and you really feel that DA’s mind and responses are JUST NOT UP to what he must be watching; everything has to be made common-or-garden somehow — whereas if the johnny-morris-de-nos-jours were doin the animal speech bubbles, all he would have been saying IN EVERY SCENE is the animals just laughing and saying “THIS IS SO AWESOME DUDE!!”