Sunny And The Elephant is a movie set in Thailand, produced in France, and out on DVD June 9th from Alliance Films.  It features some great shots of elephants, and jungles, and some interesting dynamics between the elephants and their human companions, called mahoot.  However, it just isn’t that good.  In fact, at moments, this movie is awful.  The biggest problem is that the movie is very juvenile.  It’s about a young boy who is desperate to become a mahoot.  (To be honest - I have no idea if I’m spelling “mahoot” properly.  The movie is in English, and they say “mahoot”, but I never saw it written.)

     So this young boy tries and tries to impress his adoptive father, who is powerfully bound to tradition, and so will not make the young man his succesor as a mahoot for his elephant, Dara.  As the movie goes on, the young man is like a kid in an episode of Degrassi, who just wants his father to notice him.  Boo-hoo and so forth.  Also belonging in a cheesy TV show is the elephant herself.  Dara appears to be incorrigible!  She doesn’t take direction, she keeps screwing up - will she EVER be able to be a part of the herd?  Oh my.  This one is like an episode of Home Improvement.  Only, the kids get an elephant instead of a dog.

     Also making appearances in the movie are some poachers straight out of a bad MacGyver episode, some evil businessmen in league with the poachers who would not be out of place on Get Smart, and a suave yet rugged naturalist who wants to save the elephants, the mahoot, and their way of life.  The whole thing is just so simple, and child-like, that it really appears to have no imagination at all.  There are a few interesting scenes, like the one where the elephant is raised out of a crater with a crane, but those scenes are few and far between, and the rest of the time I felt like I was watching a Thai version of Happy Days.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under 2008, Drama, Foreign, France, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.