- #What happened to the little camel that played in the zookeepers wife movie#
- #What happened to the little camel that played in the zookeepers wife manual#
According to this article at The Directors Guild of America, very little CGI was used in the film. Brilliantly shot – the mother elephant impatiently demanding action, pushing at Antonina with her trunk, while Antonina struggled to clear the baby’s breathing. We saw an amazing scene between Antonina, the mother elephant and the baby elephant. While entertaining Heck at a cocktail party before the war, Antonina was called away. They were acquainted with a German zoologist named Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl). Jan Zabinski (Johan Heldenbergh), his wife Antonina, and son Ryszard (Timothy Radford and later Val Maloku) lived at and ran the Warsaw Zoo. The music, the editing with a focus on the emotions of the women in the story, the ease the actors had with the animals – it all worked together to create unremitting powerful emotions. Looking at war from a woman’s point of view was gut wrenching. Many details from the book were left out, things were simplified and streamlined, but the film had more meaning for me. I read the book, but I have to agree with the friend who went to the film with me: sometimes a film is actually better than the book. The Zookeeper’s Wife was directed by Niki Caro and written by Angela Workman based on the book by Diane Ackerman. We dig in with her to relate to the animals, her family, and the frightened people snatched secretly from the Warsaw ghetto and saved in the hidden basements of the zoo. Everything moves through the eyes of Antonina Zabinski (Jessica Chastain), the Zookeeper’s wife. Yet I’ve never seen any WWII film that that hit me with so much emotion.Ĭredit for the emotional punch goes to the female gaze of the film.
#What happened to the little camel that played in the zookeepers wife movie#
My earliest film memories include Audie Murphy or Aldo Ray in some heroic war movie or other.
I’ve been watching World War II movies since 1945. The Zookeeper’s Wife was a very good film. The theater was packed! I didn’t hear any sobbing, but, frankly, I felt like sobbing uncontrollably several times during the film.
A heroine like that isn’t of this world, and neither are the stakes.I saw The Zookeeper’s Wife on opening weekend at the earliest matinee. She, like her zoo, is perfect beyond plausibility. You can practically imagine the animals gathering to help her get dressed every morning. It’s yet another example of the way the movie treats Antonina like some kind of wartime Cinderella. That statement doesn’t really pass the test of logic: Really? Even squirrels? While she’s trying to connect with a young girl who was just raped by German soldiers (Shira Haas), she explains why she loves and trusts animals so much: “You look in their eyes and you know exactly what’s in their hearts.”
Maybe Antonina’s preference for the animal kingdom is partly to blame. The drama’s greatest misstep is making the deaths of the zoo’s creatures more horrifying than some of history’s greatest atrocities. “Whale Rider” director Niki Caro and screenwriter Angela Workman (“ Snow Flower and the Secret Fan”) deliver a fitfully engaging, conspicuously cleaned-up Holocaust drama that, while well-acted all around, gets bogged down by its insistence on hewing to formula. It’s a story that promises major suspense, which only materializes occasionally. Jan and Antonina resolve to offer sanctuary until their “guests,” as they call them, can be relocated. The Zabinskis formulate a plan to smuggle some of the interned Jews into the zoo - which is swarming with Nazis, who have commandeered the grounds for military use. Not only does he ship Warsaw’s most prized animals back to Berlin - shooting the ones he doesn’t want - he also takes an unhealthy interest in Antonina.Īround that same time, the city’s Jews, including several of the couple’s friends, are being rounded up and forcibly relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. German zoologist Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl) becomes the zoo’s new overseer. Pretty soon bombs are falling, and the arriving Nazi troops take over the city, including the zoo.
#What happened to the little camel that played in the zookeepers wife manual#
Manual labor never looked so pretty.īut this reverie can’t last forever. Just when it seems like the scenes can’t get any more idyllic, Antonina tracks down her loving husband, gives him a kiss, kicks off her heels and offers to pitch in shoveling hay. At home, her son sleeps alongside a couple of adorable lion cubs. On the eve of the invasion, the Warsaw Zoo is portrayed as a magical Shangri-La - a place where Antonina, outfitted in a flowing floral frock, makes her morning rounds on a bicycle accompanied by a nearly tame camel, trotting at her heels. (Anne Marie Fox/Focus Features)īut right off the bat, something seems off about the framing of their story. Johan Heldenbergh stars as Jan Zabinski in the adaptation of Diane Ackerman’s 2007 nonfiction book.