Autumn and the Black Jaguar (2024)

Autumn and the Black Jaguar Review

The movie Autumn and the Black Jaguar is about a girl named Autumn Edison (Lumi Pollack) who lives in New York City and attends middle school there. She was raised in a rainforest in Latin America by her environmentalist parents her dad from the North, her mother of the local indigenous nation so she treats the jungle as her backyard. As a baby, she befriended a black jaguar cub whose mother was shot by poachers; they grew up together. But now developers and animal traffickers, led by evil Poacher Doria Dargan (Kelly Hope Taylor), want to evict her people from their land, while hunting rare species to sell on the black market. When Autumn’s mom gets killed, her dad takes her back to North America where it’s safe but seven years later, she’s almost a teenager and still hates it up there. No one cares about animals or the environment! Especially not biology teacher Anja (Emily Bett Rickards), who wants to dissect frogs can you believe it? and whom Autumn refuses to let participate in such cruelty without staging a one-person protest against it first; this isn’t even close to being the first time she has been suspended from school. Bored at home during her latest suspension, Autumn discovers in some old junk mail a letter from her uncle down south: “Our lives are hanging by threads,” he writes. “They want to build a dam here that will flood everything we’ve known for millennia and they’re after Hope.” Hope is what they’d named that jaguar.

Autumn takes this as an invitation back into herself; lies tells Dad all is well while secretly rushing airport-ward. Of course teacher famous for germ-fearing, insecure introvert tendencies leading to agoraphobic habits somehow follows fearing child’s danger wants only bring child home risking every phobia along way save kid though winds up in jungle alone with kid who confidently knows where she is. Does she find it? Can she stop them from destroying everything and taking away the last one? Oh, I don’t know. I’m not a movie.

Autumn and the Black Jaguar is a heartwarming children’s film. By “children,” I guess I mean really little ones because as an adult viewer, most of the dialogue here felt klunky at best, cringy at worst, like Chat GBT written by Google Translate edited by. The teacher talks like a cartoon character for crying out loud, comically overreacting to everything she sees (like on any kids’ TV show). But there are some cool adventures in tall trees and walkabouts on top of the forest’s canopy that little kids will probably dig.

I was impressed by the CGI version of a jaguar playing with Autumn it looked real; could they have superimposed a CGI head on top of friendly dog’s body? But then after some research discovered actress Lumi Pollack spent 10 months learning how to bond with two actual jaguars so that wild cat is actually there! Props.

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