What is it with zoo animals in New York these days? Seems the caged critters just won't stay put in their pens, preferring instead to try their luck – for better or worse – in the wild.
We're talking about computer-generated animals, of course. In Disney's CG comedy-adventure The Wild, a lion named Samson (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland) leads a gang of his fellow New York zoo denizens on a dangerous mission to rescue his son Ryan (Greg Cipes) from the wilds of Africa. Along on the safari are Bridget the Giraffe (Janeane Garofalo), Benny the Squirrel (Jim Belushi), Larry the Anaconda (Richard Kind) and Nigel the Koala (Eddie Izzard), plus the villainous wildebeest Kazar (William Shatner) and even a penguin or three.
No, it's not a Madagascar redux, but there are similarities between The Wild and that 2005 CG film from Disney's arch-rival, DreamWorks Animation SKG. If nothing else, the repeated theme reminds us that Hollywood is, after all, a small town where ideas seem to easily flow through the porous walls of competing studios.
The Wild Kingdom
According to The Wild's, director, Steve "Spaz" Williams, Madagascar may have hit theaters first, but Disney was entertaining the basic idea for its film as far back as the mid-1990s, if not earlier. "The premise of a bunch of zoo animals escaping from the city zoo and going through this adventure has been around a long time," Williams says. "When we came aboard the project in 2001, we had no idea about Madagascar!"
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