MOVIE REVIEW : ANIMALS GET BEAUTIFUL IN UYS’ ‘PEOPLE’

Back in 1974, a then-unknown South African documentary film maker named Jamie Uys made a vibrant nature film called “Beautiful People.” Now that Uys has scored a phenomenal hit with “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” his earlier picture returns Sunday for a one-week run at the Nuart under the more specific title, “Animals Are Beautiful People.”

This 88-minute Warner Bros. Classics release remains impressive for Uys’ ability to select and arrange his superb footage--culled from 500,000 feet of film shot over four years--so precisely and imaginatively that it emerges as a series of mini-dramas. With his sharp, patient eye for detail, he brings alive vast expanses of gorgeous African wilderness as he observes creatures tiny and huge, common and exotic, in their daily routines.

At the same time, however, the film clarifies Uys’ strengths as a film maker--and some of the weaknesses of “The Gods Must Be Crazy” (for all its popularity). One remark in particular, spoken by off-screen narrator Paddy O’Byrne, now takes on primary significance as anticipating the key theme of “The Gods,” his subsequent film. Introducing us to a family of Bushmen, among the very few humans on view, he says of them, “They must be the most contented people in the world because they don’t own anything.” Perhaps that sentiment works in a nature film; it raises thorny moral and political issues in a comedy that takes pains not to remind us of its South African apartheid origins.

On the other hand, some of the same spirit of mirthfulness in “The Gods Must Be Crazy” threads throughout “Animals Are Beautiful People”--baboons turning awkward cartwheels, two porcupines (who should know better) trying to enter a small hole in the ground at the same time, and the film’s hilarious high point, a zoo’s worth of animals getting falling-down drunk on fermented fruit.

“Animals” is to be commended for being more concerned with eliciting a sense of wonderment at nature’s infinite variety and adaptability than with making still another savage survival-of-the-fittest saga in the Disney “Living Desert” tradition. As a result, “Animals Are Beautiful People” (rated G) is especially fine family entertainment.