De Wilde Stad (Blu-ray) – Documentary Review
We don’t review documentaries very often on our site, but every now and then, we do get the opportunity. For this review, we were sent ‘De Wilde Stad’ (The Wild City), where a cat called Abatutu shows us around in Amsterdam. The documentary may be aimed more towards children, but adults will certainly enjoy it as well.
Abatutu is a house cat that lives in Amsterdam. He’s quite the adventurous type, and he’s eager to show us what the city has to offer. But mostly, he wants to show the unexpected life in the city, as there are many more animals who live and thrive in the city than you could imagine. And so the journey begins.
The film takes you all around the city, and shows life in the air, in the water, at day and by night. You’ll see pigeons, seagulls, buzzards, but also ducks, hedgehogs, foxed, toads, lobsters, rats and many other animals will pass the revue. Abatutu (Martijn Fischer) will provide the necessary information (yes, the cat speaks!), so you know exactly what’s going on.
We found it quite a refreshing idea to let the viewer see the city through a cat’s eyes. That way the whole concept feels quite natural and the different scenes fluently follow on each other, as Abatutu decides to move on to a different part of town. He never stops very long at a specific place, but you do get enough information to get an idea about the animal and its habitat. Abatutu speaks Dutch, but there are English subtitles available.
The documentary presents you with very fine filmography, meaning that the camera action is pretty damn good. At places you would have never expected to see so much life, the makes managed to film the animals in a beautiful way, where you sometimes even forget that the shots were actually taken in a crowded city. In between scenes, popular, often Dutch, music is played, which makes it all maybe a bit more hip and trendy, but it wasn’t really an asset in our eyes. The documentary looks good in itself and didn’t need this music, as it just feels a bit out of place.
There were no extras on this release, which is quite normal for a documentary, but as it is more or less aimed towards children as well, it would have been nice to have some kind of extra information, such as a making of. Nonetheless, we were happy with the release as it is.
Conclusion
De Wilde Stad is a very fine documentary about animals living in a busy city, in this case Amsterdam. The filmography is beautiful, and we really liked the idea of seeing the city through the eyes of the cat Abatutu. You don’t get overwhelmed with information, but you get told enough about the different species nonetheless. We didn’t like the music in the documentary that much, as it seemed a bit ill-fitting, but overall, we were really impressed with this documentary. It’s definitely worth the watch.
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