AUTUMN AND THE BLACK JAGUAR - Mark Reviews Movies

Autumn and the Black Jaguar, Blue Fox Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 16, 2025

Once one gets past the inherent problems of the plot, Autumn and the Black Jaguar isn't much better. It's a movie that means well, addressing issues of the deforestation of the rainforests and poaching, and really, that might be all it has going for it.

The message is usually at forefront of director Gilles de Miastre's movie, which makes this otherwise-dunderheaded material somewhat tolerable. It's about a girl named Autumn (played as a child by Airam Camacho and a teen by Lumi Pollack) who raises an orphaned jaguar cub on her own, while living with her parents in the Amazon, and, after learning the jaguar is in danger as a teenager, leaves New York City to return to the rainforest in order to save the now-big cat. It's not a good idea, obviously, but it's somehow not the least intelligent one in the story.

That comes from the teenage girl's biology teacher Anja (Emily Bett Rickards), who discovers her student's plan and decides the only way to stop the girl from going on this mission is to chase her to the airport. Anja has agoraphobia, which is only quelled by having an injured hedgehog she rescued with her, and already, the character is simply too much to bear. Rickards deserves some credit for making the character slightly tolerable, because the screenplay by Prune de Maistre (the director's wife) certainly doesn't.

Anja is the comic relief here, in case that isn't clear yet, because crippling mental health issues are apparently amusing, a character screaming and panicking at the sight of just about everything in the natural world is the height of comedy, and a character who could have solved the problem that gets her to the rainforest with a single phone call is obviously necessary to the plot. That last one is actually accurate, because the story wouldn't happen if this teacher had even a bit of basic common sense. We know she has a phone, by the way, because Anja's first instinct upon learning of Autumn's plan is to call her own mother to help her get to the airport. Why she doesn't call the girl's father (played by Paul Greene) is anybody's guess.

To harp on this point for too long would be fruitless. It's a dumb contrivance, to put it generously, and as much as the filmmakers try to make Anja's terrified antics into a major part of the story, this isn't actually the teacher's tale. No, it belongs to Autumn, who somehow buys multiple plane tickets to get from New York to the Amazon and gets through all of the security and international customs officials necessary to do such traveling as a minor. This isn't helping the movie's case, either, so let's just bypass the plot's setup and get to the meat of it.

That is Autumn's relationship with the jaguar, which she discovered as a young girl while her parents—her doctor father and environmental activist mother (played by Eva Avila)—were working in the rainforest. The cub's mother is shot off-screen by poachers, and after the girl plays with the baby jaguar and teaches it to swim and has other photo opportunities with the little creature, Autumn's own mother is murdered off-screen by poachers, too. The father and daughter move to New York, and years later, Autumn discovers a letter to her father from Oré (Wayne Charles Baker), the leader of an indigenous tribe in the Amazon (It's probably best to ignore the insensitive, Halloween store-level costuming for that group of characters, if that's possible). The rainforest is in increasing danger, and the jaguar, which Autumn named Hope, is the last of its kind in the area.

This eventually leads to a reunion for Autumn and Hope, a series of adventures as the pair and third-wheel biology teacher try to survive in the jungle and evade poachers, and various characters repeatedly telling us how important it is that nature not be ruined by human activity, that there's a web of the natural world, and that humanity, which is part of that web, is causing its own doom by destroying parts of that system. It's a worthwhile message, obviously, and since the movie is aimed at kids, we can forgive the filmmakers their insistence on stating it so bluntly and repeatedly.

There's still the little problem of the rest of Autumn and the Black Jaguar, though. It is contrived beyond belief, features several characters who are fundamentally unbelievable on distinct levels, and is a generally poor excuse for lots of shots of kids and a jaguar being cute together. Something that means this well shouldn't be this incompetent on a few basic levels.

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