How many times can Dad say, “He’s not a bloody pet!” before the actor ( Langley Kirkwood) is entitled to yell, “Can we get a rewrite, here?” When you’re piecing together a movie over years, bending your script to fit the reality of the growing cat’s personality and the maturing of your leading lady (de Villiers), and working with a large and potentially dangerous creature we are constantly reminded is “still a wild animal,” you’re constantly shooting at a moving target. Performances can’t find a rhythm and the melodramatic narrative suffers for it. The “years-in-the-making” is both a tribute to the filmmakers’ perseverance, and an explanation for how choppy, jerky and repetitive “White Lion” is. “Mia and the White Lion” has that going for it, a three years-in-the-making Franco-South African production which paired up a child - played by Daniah de Villiers - with a lion cub for a story of family, the bond between humans and animals and the harsh reality that a lot of “rescue” work for orphan wildlife is just a business.
And you’d best have a white lion handy that you can follow and bond with from oversized kitten to King of the Veldt. So if you’re making a movie about a girl who grows up to be great friends with a lion - a “white” lion, mind you - you’d better tie down a lot of time in the child actor’s schedule. If “Dumbo” taught us nothing else, it’s that if you’re going to make a movie with children interacting with animals, you need real animals for that to connect with an audience.
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