After the animated lemur King Julien of Madagascar captured children’s attentions with his eccentricity, a new film takes them to the real, isolated world of the singing, dancing, mischievous lemurs.
Island of Lemurs: Madagascar, out in US Imax theatres tomorrow, takes audiences on a 3D adventure into the exotic habitat of the lemurs on the island of Madagascar, the only place in the world where they exist in the wild.
The 40-minute film, narrated by Morgan Freeman, explores and educates on the wide-eyed lemurs, a family of primate species that has been around for more than 60 million years, and the journey they took from Africa across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, where they found a thriving natural habitat.
“We should all teach our kids about the importance of plain old diversity on the planet. The planet is sustained by diversity and we’re killing it all. It’s catastrophe,” Freeman said.
King Julien and friends in the 2005 film Madagascar.The film follows primatologist Patricia Wright as she strives to save certain lemur species from extinction, finding mates for the few left in the dense Madagascar forests.
“These extraordinary creatures are a lot like us. They have families, they raise their offspring and have problems with their offspring,” Wright said.
From the Indri, the largest of the lemurs, to the smallest primate in the world, the mouse lemur, the dancing sifakas and the bamboo lemurs that seek out baby bamboo shoots to snack on, the film shows each animal’s specific personalities.
Lemurs have largely been underrepresented in films and television due to their isolation on Madagascar, Freeman said, but the character of King Julien in the DreamWorks animated Madagascar films, voiced by British actor Sacha Baron Cohen, paved a path to awareness of lemurs.
Lemurs are at the last chance stage in their long existence
The lemurs do face threats, especially some species that are close to extinction, from deforestation and poaching, as some Malagasy people are driven to eat local wildlife due to poverty. Some giant lemur species have already become extinct, and others are critically endangered as more than 90 per cent of the island’s forests have been destroyed.
“Lemurs are at the last chance stage in their long existence and we felt that they were disappearing simply through people’s ignorance of them,” director David Douglas said.
Island of Lemurs, from Warner Bros studios, shows village communities being re-educated on the unique nature of the lemurs and what they mean to the Madagascar ecosystem, encouraging their protection.