I was pleasantly surprised by “Buddy,” the true story of a baby gorilla no one thought would live.
Renee Russo stars as Trudy Lintz, an animal lover who lived back at the turn of the last century. She has a houseful of animals, from horses to ducks to dogs to kittens to birds – and two adorable chimps named Maggie and Joe. She’s raising the chimps like children, down to teaching them manners and dressing them in clothes, and things are going fairly well – except that Maggie is a little bit of a trouble maker. She likes to let the other animals out of their cages. Thankfully, Trudy’s not alone in dealing with the mayhem – her husband, her assistant Dick, and her housekeeper all pitch in and lend a hand.
One day, Trudy gets a call from a zoo in Philadelphia. They’ve obtained a baby gorilla and it’s terribly sick – they wonder if Trudy can come help them. She’s furious that they’ve taken the baby without the mother – no baby left on its own had ever survived captivity. She takes the baby home with her and nurses him back to health, naming him Buddy.
This is where Jim Henson’s Creature Shop really comes into play – the baby gorilla is a mechanized stuffed animal. The special effects are quite amazing.
As Buddy gets bigger, he’s more and more of a handful, literally. He gains a hundred pounds a year and gets stronger, too – and his manners just aren’t as good as the chimps’, although he is learning.
Trudy is invited to take the apes to the Chicago World’s Fair, and against her husband’s advice, takes Buddy along too. He becomes frightened with all the strange noises and crowds, and gets loose, to run amok through the streets. When they bring him home, he’s not the same, and even comes close to attacking Trudy, which he would never have done before.
She eventually realizes that she must give him up, and helps to create a wonderful gorilla habitat at the zoo, where he lived to the age of 54, longer than any other captive gorilla in history.
You and your children will love this movie up until the point where they go to the World’s Fair. I would recommend pausing it, putting the kids down, and then finishing out the film as parents. The scenes where Buddy acts out may be too scary for a young viewer, but the first half of the film is a sheer delight.
This film is rated PG.
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