The Route to Cappyness

This has obviously been a labour of love for director Sharon Walia as she spent three years travelling the world to make a film on the capybara. Starting off in Brazil where they roam some communities freely, she moves on to Japan - where they have steam baths - then to the USA and finally back to the UK were "Cinnamon" became a bit of an household name when he escaped from his zoo and set up home in some nearby woods. The thing is, she's clearly had little by way of budget and has even less intention of telling us much about these critters - apart from the facts that we call their young pups; they like to live in communities and that they eat - boy do they eat: their permanently growing front teeth ensure that they can consume up to 3kg of vegetation per day. This is essentially an enthusiastically narrated home video that is full to the brim of beastie photography - some of it recycled - but lacking in just about everything else. The sound recording is all over the place and the picture editing - well, that's just brutal and reminded me of the good old days when you used a razor blade and some sellotape. If you are a pet lover, which is really the approach she takes here, then you might get a little more of the "aw, bless, aren't they cute?" from this, but I'm not particularly and to be honest I was much more interested in the alligators in Florida's "Gatorland" than I was in yet another sequence of these pig-sized grazers munching their way through another photo-shoot. It'd be fine as a twenty minutes short feature illustrating their global presence and appeal, but as a full length natural history documentary it's all just far too repetitious and scientifically lacking.