Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins is a 2008 television film created by Discovery Films and Oxford Scientific Films as a prequel to the Animal Planet series Meerkat Manor. A scripted documentary narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, the film details the life of a meerkat named Flower from birth to her becoming the leader of a meerkat group called the Whiskers. The film is based on the research notes of the Kalahari Meerkat Project and primarily uses wild meerkat "actors" to represent those in the story.

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dbpedia-owl:Film/distributor
dbpedia-owl:Film/narrator
dbpedia-owl:Work/releaseDate
  • 2008-05-25 (xsd:date)
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  • 4500 (xsd:double)
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dbpedia-owl:distributor
dbpedia-owl:narrator
dbpedia-owl:releaseDate
  • 2008-05-25 (xsd:date)
dbpedia-owl:runtime
  • 4500 (xsd:double)
dbpprop:abstract
  • Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins is a 2008 television film created by Discovery Films and Oxford Scientific Films as a prequel to the Animal Planet series Meerkat Manor. A scripted documentary narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, the film details the life of a meerkat named Flower from birth to her becoming the leader of a meerkat group called the Whiskers. The film is based on the research notes of the Kalahari Meerkat Project and primarily uses wild meerkat "actors" to represent those in the story. Shot over two years at the Kuruman River Reserve in Northern Cape, South Africa, the film employed a much larger crew than the series. Some scenes were shot at a wildlife park in the United Kingdom, while others were created using camera tricks and trained film animals. The 75-minute film premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival before its television premiere on Animal Planet on May 25, 2008. While it was praised for its cinematography, for maintaining the depth of coverage of the television series, and for its accessibility to newcomers to the series, it was criticized for not offering anything new to fans. The Kalahari Meerkat Project noted that the film was not completely accurate but praised it overall, though one reviewer found the "fictionalization" regrettable. Several reviewers praised Goldberg's narration, but the script was cited as being too simplistic for adult viewers.
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  • DVD cover with the film title at a white scripted font at the top, followed in the center by an image of an adult female meerkat sitting upright and a young meerkat peeking out from around her chest with its head and neck visible and one paw draped over the female's paw. At the bottom a blue banner notes the film is narrated by Whoopi Goldberg.
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  • c6dbf7
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  • Region 1 DVD cover
dbpprop:cinematography
  • Robin Smith John Walters
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dbpprop:director
  • Chris Barker Mike Slee
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dbpprop:editing
  • Oral Norrie Ottey
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  • left
dbpprop:language
  • English
dbpprop:music
  • Laurent Ferlet
dbpprop:name
  • Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins
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dbpprop:producer
  • Caroline Hawkins Clare Birks Carole Tomko Mick Kaczorowski Mark Wild
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  • "The television series was specifically shot very low and intimate so you have a one-on-one relationship with the meerkats. We put you in their world immediately and you spend almost all your time at their eye level. But we knew to make a feature film we needed something bigger. We had to bring in bigger toys to expand it. We wanted to give everybody a sense of how big the Kalahari is."
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dbpprop:runtime
  • 75 minutes
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  • —Mick Kaczorowski, Senior Executive Producer
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  • 25em
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  • Caroline Hawkins
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rdfs:comment
  • Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins is a 2008 television film created by Discovery Films and Oxford Scientific Films as a prequel to the Animal Planet series Meerkat Manor. A scripted documentary narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, the film details the life of a meerkat named Flower from birth to her becoming the leader of a meerkat group called the Whiskers. The film is based on the research notes of the Kalahari Meerkat Project and primarily uses wild meerkat "actors" to represent those in the story.
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  • Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins
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  • Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins
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