Elephant review – Meghan Markle narrates sugary-sweet Disney doc

The title of Disney’s new nature documentary Elephant sticks to basic truths. It reflects the tone of the film to some extent, which is accessible and entertaining, without ever being challenging or surprising. Elephant takes stock of one specific family of elephants in the Kalahari Desert on a journey to find water. There’s Gaia, matriarch of the herd, Shani, her sister, and Jomo, Shani’s galloping son.

Yet the compelling and potentially game-changing aspect of Elephant is its narrator. Meghan Markle, credited here as “Meghan, Duchess of Sussex,” provides the voiceover. It’s a major casting decision – not because Markle isn’t up to the task (she was an actor before she married Prince Harry), but because this is her first job back in Hollywood.

In short: she’s a delight. This is no David Attenborough, with jolts of bewilderment at the scope of the natural world. As you hear Markle smiling through her script, you could imagine this being spun as a bedtime story without needing to make a single adjustment.

It’s family-friendly material, but sufficiently solemn in parts. There’s a whole animated narrative imagined between all these animals – particularly on the matriarch elephants – and the script is sporadically poetic. And as ever, seeing so many animals lensed with such intimacy and care is a real treat.

The elephants’ annual pilgrimage to a safe water source is framed as both an adventure and a meditation on the cycles of life: on the way, calves are born, matriarchs die. There’s ample existentialism used as both education and distraction, guided along by a sugary-sweet narrator – a balance of harmless and important documentary work is found with grace.

Elephant is now streaming on Disney+.