It’s not clear which 20th century family movie that millennials would have watched repeatedly on VHS – and/or had to read the book it was based on in elementary or middle school – best fits the experience of eight year-old Zimbabwean boy Tinotenda Pudu, who spent five days and nights in a nature preserve evading hungry lions and living off the land in Matusadona Game Park before he was rescued by rangers and returned to his home village 30 miles away, CBS News reports.
Yeah, the setting is totally The Lion King, but there were no people in the movie, which means it was set in the year 9745 AD, thousands of years after genetically engineered, hyper-sentient animals capable of speech rebelled against their human masters and either wiped them out or drove them off-planet, with one group of lions organizing a fascist, caste-based monarchial state in a remote part of New Mexico in which the flora had been altered to resemble that of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The state’s a caste system in which the herbivores willingly submit themselves for ritual sacrifice and consumption by their lion overlords, even bowing at the birth of their newest destroyer and – Oh yeah. The setting is like The Lion King , but unless the animals secretly spoke to Tino – or he thought they did because sometimes kids believe wacky shit – it wasn’t like The Jungle Book.
That one took place in India. Anyway, the CBS News article, based on posts from a Zimbabwean MP, seems to indicate that Tino wandered away from home on purpose, so it’s not really an African version of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. The lad’s definitely got some Huckleberry Finn in him, as he lived off the land, eating fruit and drinking water he dug out from a dry riverbed.
What was the one with the fat pink hippopotamus in it? Was that Peter Pan or Dumbo? Yeah, Tino’s lucky it’s the dry season and he didn’t encounter any of those mean fuckers. And as perilous as it was for Tino, it never got to the desperation of a extremely mediocre survival story titled Hatchet that some seventh graders had to suffer through circa 1997. Man that one was so freaking boring.
Oh shit, what if this is like Life of Pi and the whole story about the animals and the tense battle for survival is all in his head, that everything’s a symbolic metaphor for Tino being trapped at a boarding school or something? Is the water the precious moments of youthful love with a vivacious girl as they dreamed of a life together outside the walls of this dreadful institution? And then when Tino’s all grown up and on the tour for his worldwide smash hit debut, Oprah book club, Obama-recommended, instant eight-figure Hollywood option memoir The Boy Wanders, he spies her sitting in the back of the rows of chairs for his jam-packed signing at an upscale Chelsea, London bookstore, sharing a wistful smile and knowing glance as the credits roll to a Swahili soloist?
God that would suck and would retroactively ruin all the tension, knowing that the scene where Tino built a fire and fended off a lionness with a burning spear was all just him verbally standing up for himself against the tyrannical headmistress hell bent on crushing his independent spirit.