Jungle Cat (1960) is the seventh and final entry in Walt Disney Productions' feature-length True-Life Adventures, an award-winning series that was credited with the creation of the nature-documentary format that has since become standard fare in movies and television. This theatrical entry, a study of the jaguar of South America's Amazon Rainforest, was adapted for Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on NBC-TV in 1964.

Jungle Cat, written and directed by James Algar and narrated by Winston Hibler, chronicles the life of a female spotted jaguar in the jungles of Brazil, where she and her family fight for survival among such creatures as crocodiles, wild pigs and a seven-foot-long carnivorous fish called a pirarucu. Viewers accustomed to more realistic documentaries on the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet may find the portrayal of jungle animals to be unduly human-like, but that's part of the innocent charm of this early example of filmed nature study.

A team of three photographers (James R. Simon, Hugh A. Wilmar and Lloyd Beebe) reportedly spent more than two years in Brazil to capture the footage for the movie, with the humidity and heat of the jungle posing constant threats to equipment and the film itself. Like other True-Life Adventures, Jungle Cat opens with a paintbrush creating an image - this time of an ancient Egyptian cat. The narrative moves on to domesticated felines, then to their wild relatives who must hunt to survive. Among other animals portrayed in the film are anteaters, lizards, monkeys, otters, sloths, snakes and various exotic birds.

The jaguar, the third-largest feline after the tiger and the lion and the largest in the Americas, resembles a leopard with its spots (although some are black like panthers) and is described in the film as a "careerist in assassination." The film shows the graceful cats battling with each other, stalking their prey, protecting their young and, in the case of the female jaguar at the center of the film, cuddling with her ebony-colored mate and her two babies (one of each color).

The mischievous monkeys provide comic relief by tormenting toucans and toying with the tail of a boa constrictor. Figuring in the suspenseful climactic sequence are sloths who try in their own sluggish way to survive an unwelcome dunking in water and the prowling of a hungry jaguar. Like its predecessors in the series, Jungle Cat was critically well-received. Howard Thompson wrote in The New York Times that the film "is striking on two counts. Although it unflinchingly stalks the king killers of the Amazonian rainforests, savagery is conveyed with a minimum of actual gore. Furthermore, Mr. Disney's expert color photographers mange to balance the perennial jungle war with truly fascinating vignettes on the side - as the opponents, tiny and huge, glide in out of the footage."

Thompson sums up by describing the film as "one of Mr. Disney's best - intimate, tasteful, strong and matter-of-fact."

By Roger Fristoe