You’ve been pronouncing “orangutan” incorrectly. You might say “orang-you-tan”, but Sir David Attenborough says “orang-ooh-tan”. I know who I’m going with.
Although Attenborough made his Netflix debut in 2020 with Our Planet , and has narrated several documentaries for the streamer since, it still feels weird to hear him narrate a film that’s not on the BBC, for whom he’s been making natural history programmes since the 1950s. Is there much qualitative difference between Secret Lives of Orangutans and a BBC production? The Netflix offering lacks the grand, epic sweep of, say, a Blue Planet but, on the other hand, it is more tightly focused in its subject. The footage itself is certainly comparable.
The film opens with a wide shot of the verdant canopy of a jungle, the highest trees shrouded in mist. The camera closes in on a smaller section of the forest in which a few trees are wildly swaying from side to side. There’s the sound of cracking branches and then we hear that familiar voice.
“This forest is home to the biggest and heaviest of all tree-living animals,” Attenborough tells us. “During their long lives, they may never even put a foot on the ground. That is why so little was known about them until just a few decades ago.
” Why the Secret Lives bit of the title? Because drones can now shoot stunning footage of the apes hanging out in the forest canopy which would previously have been difficult to film. We can now see, for example, that the .