‘The Lion King,’ a reality show

For more than two years, from August 2008 to October 2010, filmmakers Keith Scholey and Alastair Fothergill (“Earth”) captured a stunning array of high-definition footage and crisp natural sound on the Masai Mara nature pre­serve in Kenya. The result of their long toil, the documentary “African Cats,” is an eye-popping real-life version of “The Lion King.” Well, kind of.

It opens today, on Earth Day.

With its relative dearth of predatory gore and a fairy-tale-like story preciously narrated by actor Samuel L. Jackson — whom you might remember from a less precious creature feature about reptiles on a plane — it also is a fine introduction to the African continent’s dizzyingly vast natural kingdom for intrigued youngsters who might find Animal Planet’s croc-and-shark feeding frenzies (not to mention “Fatal Attractions: Travis the Chimp Attacks Owner”) too intense.

For dramatic purposes, and not always effectively, Scholey and Fothergill present characters with names and families rather than random fauna with offspring. There’s Sita the Cheetah, fierce protector of her five cubs. There’s Layla the lioness, fierce protector of her one cub, Mara. There’s Fang the grizzled male lion, broken-toothed head of a large “river pride,” and Kali his menacing maned nemesis to the north. 

Additionally, there are hippos, crocodiles, elephants, ostriches, warthogs, wildebeests, gazelles, giraffes, rhinos, a lone giant tortoise, conniving hyenas and assorted airborne inhabitants of these life-teeming and often harsh lands where only the strong and sneaky (and weaker friends of the strong and sneaky) survive. 

Viewing this contrived-seeming but exceedingly well-shot saga on the big screen in digital surround-sound makes all the difference. Full immersion is key. So unless you’ve got a killer set-up at home for when the DVD comes out, this documentary is best seen in a theater. Through the use of powerful camera lenses, we’re given up-close-and-personal views of territorial skirmishes, blazing chases, carefree frolicking and near-misses the likes of which Teddy Roosevelt surely never witnessed during his many years of bagging beasties on safari.

Monstrous jaws clamp shut, magnificent muscles ripple, yellowish eyes blaze — with fear, with focus, with wariness. In a particularly visceral scene, Fang successfully faces down a dinosaur-sized croc that tries to snare itself a hunk of the pride’s riverbank meal, a scrumptious dead hippo. There are times, though, when this so-called king of the jungle more resembles Bert Lahr’s feckless feline in “The Wizard of Oz.” 

And while “African Cats” is no “Wizard of Oz,” it too depicts an unpredictable, wonder-filled world that to most humans is as foreign and forbidding as Dorothy’s yellow-bricked fantasy realm — minus the tigers and bears. And flying monkeys. And creepy Munchkins. Wow, this took a weird turn.