“This is part of the legacy of this studio,” explained Disneynature Tiger producer Roy Conli during a recent interview about the new film, debuting this Earth Day on Disney+. Roy Conli is best known for his producing work at Walt Disney Animation Studios, a career that began on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and includes an Oscar win for Big Hero 6. Tiger marks Roy’s sixth Disneynature film. “Walt [Disney], in a sense, invented the whole concept of natural history filmmaking with the films he made between 1948 and 1960, the True Life Adventures, which had an impact on me as well. I saw them on reruns of The Wonderful World of Disney when I was a kid.” Another source of early inspiration for Roy was Walt Disney’s animated classic, The Jungle Book, which he remembers seeing on the big screen as a child. Filmed in India, Tiger features animals that inspired Rudyard Kipling to create characters like Shere Khan, Balloo, Kaa, and King Louie.
“I was involved with Earth, so I was there right at the very beginning,” reflected director Mark Linfield, who has been working with Disneynature since its inception (his other credits include Chimpanzee, Monkey Kingdom, and Elephant). “I'm so pleased that the brand has gone from strength to strength, and that Disney is still making 75-minute nature films. Although they're not on the big screen anymore, which was obviously the original intention, just the fact that they're 75 minutes long where we get to unfold a proper story, that much in itself is great. And there's really no one else doing that right now. So we're very grateful to Disney for giving us the chance to to make these shows.”
Co-directing the film is Mark’s wife and Wildstar Films co-founder Vanessa Berlowitz, who recently had another successful natural history launch on Disney+ with National Geographic’s Queens. “They were wonderfully complimentary,” Vanessa said about juggling both projects, one focused on different types of matriarchs in the animal kingdom, the other about a tigress mother. “We've had very little insight into what tigers were like as mothers. We've just glimpsed them occasionally in the past because they're so difficult to film. The story that started to unfold with Ambar was just how amazing she was as a mother. She's juggling probably one of the hardest mothering jobs that you can have, where you've got to hunt for four cubs every other day at some point. And protect the cubs, who are really vulnerable to attacks from pythons and other males. And train them to be A-grade hunters along the way. I think she had it about as hard as it gets in nature. So alongside the queens that we were featuring for that show, Tiger was actually demonstrating probably the ultimate motherhood challenge. A very impressive female.”
(Tom Walker/Disney)
Based in Southern California and balancing producing Disney animated films like Strange World, Roy Conli’s role as a producer on Tiger is more involved with crafting a story from the footage that comes back, similar to how Walt Disney’s True Life Adventure films set out to let nature tell the story. “We have an idea of the kind of story we want to tell, but until that footage comes in, we don't know what that story is going to be,” Roy explained. “With animation, you start with a blank piece of paper, literally, and you start creating a story. But somewhere, strangely in the middle, they meet.” The story that emerged from over five years of filming in India became immediately clear in this case. “Ambar was the one tigress that we really fell in love with. The fact that she had this amazing litter of four cubs who had personalities that you could recognize immediately after they were born, it really made the story kind of special.” Also of special interest is a sequence when a suitor, Shankar, makes an incredible hunt as a romantic gesture to woo Ambar. “Shankar hunts down a sloth bear, which is very rare, and it's never been caught on film before. The fact that we were able to share that, and then the fact that he actually presents that bear as a prize to Ambar, was amazingly emotional, and it really gave us the entire ending of our film.” Like Tramp giving Lady the last meatball in Lady and the Tramp, or Paul having a Cracker Jack ring engraved for Holly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Shankar’s gesture to Ambar was made for the screen.
Bringing Tiger to the screen was no small feat. “I always think of production as being from green light to delivery, which in this case was over six years,” Mark Linfield revealed. “It was actually five years of filming, which is really unusual. Usually, we spend two and a half, perhaps three, so it's a particularly long one. That's partly because we had a few bumps along the road with COVID, but partly because tigers are extremely difficult. They're very secretive, and it's pretty hard to get exceptional material. But on the ground, we in wildlife filmmaking favor small crews for long periods of time. It's completely different from the Hollywood models, where you have vast crews for tiny amounts of time because the talent's so expensive. Our talent is not very expensive, but it often doesn't turn up, so the only way we can afford to make it work is to have small crews for long periods. In this case, our crews were a combination of some fantastic Indian talent and some of the best-in-class talent from around the world. But there's usually one or two tiny crews on location at any one time, and lots of Indian tiger experts and guides basically showing us where the tigers were. Without their help, it would’ve been incredibly difficult to find and follow them.”
(Martyn Colbeck/Disney)
“Right from the start, we wanted to make a different kind of companion film,” Vanessa Berlowitz revealed about the documentary Tigers on the Rise, also streaming on April 22nd. “There was an amazing opportunity to make an important film about an amazing story that I don't think many people in our part of the world are really aware of, which is the fact that tigers are doing really well. They've gone from 1,500 in 2006 to over 3,500 in less than 20 years, which is all down to the Indian people. We wanted to feature all those people from the grassroots level to the government level who have really turned around the story of this animal. And we feel that we've got a nice connection from our Indian crew, who were helping support us on the main film, but also were very connected to the characters that you meet in Tigers on the Rise.”
Disneynature Tiger and Tigers on the Rise will both be available to stream on Monday, April 22nd, as part of the Disney+ Earth Day celebration. Our video interview with Roy Conli, Mark Linfield, and Vanessa Berlowitz provides more about the making of both films.