That should be a chilling scene, showing how the girl develops the false sense of security that will guide her decisions for the next few years. His play gets aggressive at one point, and he moves to bite her, at which point she whacks him on the nose.
Four months later, the adorable “Charlie” hangs out in her bedroom. The kids, having been raised on a folk legend identifying white lions as symbols of harmony (“He’s come to save us all,” someone says later), are delighted, and soon Mia cares more about this cat than her British Skype buddies. On Christmas morning, Dad walks in with a newborn white lion.
Mia’s older brother Mick (Ryan Mac Lennan), plagued by panic attacks and nightmares, finds comfort as an aspiring veterinarian, rescuing lap-sized critters who’ve been wounded. However resentful the girl is about losing her human friends, opening scenes will wow young animal-loving viewers it’s like a Nat Geo version of We Bought a Zoo, with wide open grasslands where giraffes and elephants roam free. In the story, De Villiers’ Mia has been unwillingly relocated from London to a South African farm her parents (Melanie Laurent and Langley Kirkwood) inherited from her grandfather. The film shot intermittently over those years, using the girl’s actual affection for the animal as its engine. Cuddly vibes quickly give way to something more questionable here, and while many kids will find the fantasy appealing, any parent buying a ticket should be legally required to show his child Grizzly Man immediately after - lest sheltered viewers buy into the film’s anthropomorphizing love of animals designed by nature to kill us.Ĭonceiving a way to turn this heartbreaking scenario into an uplifting fiction, the filmmakers then teamed with South African zookeeper Kevin Richardson to make it convincing without CG: They cast a girl, Daniah De Villiers, who would spend the next three years befriending an actual white lion cub. Upsetting facts about the trade in lions sold for “canned hunts” serve as springboard for sentimental adventure in Gilles de Maistre’s Mia and the White Lion: Here, a girl who has spent three years watching a lion cub grow sets the now-huge beast free, trusting that it won’t eat anyone while she walks it cross-country to safety.