Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Animal’ On Netflix, A Celebrity-Narrated Nature Series With Remarkable Photography

Animal is a four-part nature docuseries that follows families of different wildlife during moments of danger, protection, survival and more. Each episode has a celebrity narrator — Rashida Jones, Bryan Cranston, Pedro Pascal, Rebel Wilson for the first season — and utilizes the latest technologies in nature filmmaking. 

ANIMAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Various big cats move through their habitats in slow motion. Narrator Rashida Jones says, “Nothing captures our imagination like a big cat.”

The Gist: The first episode is about “Big Cats”, and it traverses the world to show various species of big cats in their natural habitats. In Botswana, a pride of lions stalks and catches a wildebeest. We see a lioness hunting alone at night, through the use of the same night vision technology that Plimsoll Productions used in their 2020 series Night On Earth. The lioness has to fight off a family of hyenas after she makes her kill but she also gets the rest of her pride for support.

The show also goes to a forest in Thailand to show the clouded leopard, who is one of the more agile big cats, one that can still climb trees. Back in Africa, tiger cubs learn to hunt by playing with their siblings and a leopard cub almost loses his life. The lion pride is threatened by wandering males intent on taking over and killing the cubs. And in the Himalayas, a snow leopard mama shows how she can climb on steep rock faces thousands of feet up in order to hunt.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like we mentioned, the show has some of the technological elements of Night On Earth. But where Animal stands out from other recent nature shows is the photography.

Our Take: The four-episode first season of Animal looks at big cats, canines, marsupials, and octopi. None of these topics are new, and much of what we see in the episodes are what we’ve seen in other nature shows. Where this show stands out is how close the film crews — all local, due to COVID travel restrictions — get to the various species, thanks to updated technologies.

We don’t normally rate a show on how it looks on newer TVs, because not all of our readers have or care to get a new TV (until recently, we did most of our TV watching on a 32″ screen from 2008… really!). But if there was ever a show that takes advantage of technologies like 4k and HDR, it’s Animal. Watch it on your computer or phone, or on your older TV and it looks great. But on a 4k TV, the colors pop, and the details in the closeups are apparent and some of the shots actually look like they have depth, despite being 2-dimensional.

The show does try to weave a narrative, especially with the families it follows, returning to the pride, for instance, periodically during the big cats episode. That narrative, helped by the celebrity narrators, tweaks the drama a little bit, but we’re pretty sure you’ll be more fascinated with the visuals than anything else.

What Age Group Is This For?: The series is rated TV-PG; we see tigers having sex and more than one shot of lions and other big cats feasting on a freshly-killed carcass, blood coating the fur around their mouths. Even if you have a nature-loving kid, this may be too intense for kids under 9.

Parting Shot: Lion cubs being nurtured by their mama. “All big cats into a life full of danger and drama. But as long as we give them the freedom they need, these magnificent animals will live on,” says Jones.

Sleeper Star: All of the local film crews who were able to get such fantastic shots, especially the one in the Himalayas.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Animal held our interest because of its amazing photography, but the energetic narration and family-centric narratives help move things along.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Animal On Netflix