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.
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.