National Geographic's Beauty and the Beasts: A Leopard's Story [VHS]
The parallel stories of a mama leopard and her two cubs and a mother warthog and her brood are tracked in this 60-minute video safari in the Mala Mala Game Preserve in South Africa's Kruger National Park. It's a story of predator versus prey, "lethal beauty" versus "the most astonishing object to ever disgrace nature," according to Academy Award-winning actor James Coburn's rugged narration. (Of course, a generation of kids have grown up with the lovable Pumbaa as their warthog role model, thanks toThe Lion King. At the risk of spoiling the ending, parents can rest assured that, oddly, the warthogs all survive.) Cackling hyenas and marauding lions enter the fray and prove as dangerous to the mother leopard as she is to the warthog family. Viewers are not spared the brutality of this truly wild life, and so there are several vivid death scenes. Incongruously, one of them is probably the video's most breathtaking sequence, in which one of the leopard cubs grown up attacks an impala and the two cleave together spiraling through the air in a doomed dance.--Kimberly Heinrichs