WI LDL I FE | T I NY CREATURES
CREATURE FEATURE The new Tiny Creatures series on Netflix combines anthropomorphised drama with 8K HDR natural history
WORDS JUL I AN M I TCHELL / P I CTURES NETFL I X
I n 1963, Disney released a feature film called The Incredible Journey . This was a stock Disney feel-good experience of the time, but with a soft serving of drama to make the finale that much sweeter. The journey in question was the one made by two dogs and a cat, across 200 miles of the Canadian wilderness back to their human family. For the animals, it must had seemed just like lots of extra walkies. A kindly sounding narrator witnessed the journey and the anthropomorphised difficulties they experienced along the way. Great family entertainment with hardly any
ignorantly seized upon some sequences as real, which proves a visit to social media instantly lowers your IQ by a margin. In fact, Tiny Creatures represents the very latest in technically efficient solutions to vastly complicated production demands. So efficient, in fact, that the Covid-19 pandemic only caught up with it during the final stages of the HDR grade. THE MESSAGE Producer, director and DOP Jonathan Jones is a celebrated natural history cinematographer and has worked on
on-screen human interaction except to set up the storyline of the trip. Netflix’s new natural history show, Tiny Creatures , harks back to that genre, but wraps it in some hugely enjoyable cinematography that, at the same time, seeks to educate you in the behaviours of some of the smaller animals on Earth; those who don’t usually get the billing that the bigger stars of the animal kingdom do. So, we have various mice, rats, owls, ducks, squirrels and birds seemingly experiencing stressful life events for our entertainment – internet trolls have
22 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 2020
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