Common Sense Note
What's more fun than frolicking with monkeys and ducklings and affectionate llamas? How about an hour at Animal Junction with the Kratt brothers and their bouncing lemur friend Zoboo?
Kids can have it all in this fun-packed PBS video that educates about the natural world while nurturing a healthy respect for it. The entertaining format -- which includes games, jokes, and riddles -- makes learning about animals and their habits fun. The playful animals hold toddlers' attention, and help impart messages about proper animal etiquette. The wild pace and mix of live-action, puppetry, and animation are an effective means of entertaining while teaching grammar school kids about the natural world around them. Older kids may have outgrown the Kratt brothers, but many find the animal antics hard to resist.
Families who watch this video may want to use it to spark their children's interest in the natural world by taking them on a nature walk in their neighborhood (to find suburban or urban wildlife), at a local zoo or in a field. How do they interact with the natural world? What's an appropriate way to treat other living animals?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Scott G. Mignola
Baby animals play in different ways, ways that prepare them for their lives as adults. This is the Kratt brothers' focus as Animal Junction is overrun with one type of exotic creature after another, from serval kittens to ducklings to a white-fronted capuchin monkey who tears the place apart looking for nuts.
Children learn a bit about the different animals species and what makes them unique, and their knowledge and creative skills are tested with such games as Find the Sheep and animated segments in which an undefined blob gradually takes on the characteristics of a specific animal, prompting kids to guess what it is.
The Kratt brothers, Chris and Martin, are something of an acquired taste. They tell corny jokes, they mug and grin at the camera, they fall down in the mud, and their simple, kindly faces make perfect targets for pie-throwing monkeys. And yet you have to hand it to them: They pack an awful lot of stuff into a 50-minute program. And this isn't just any stuff. This is educational, environmentally conscious, ecologically friendly stuff. And they make it fun.
Children who accept the Kratts' invitation into the wildlife playground of Animal Junction are treated to close-up views of serval kittens (long-legged African wildcats), an elephant whose back gets scratched with a giant novelty toothbrush, ducklings, several monkey species, and lion cubs batting around a soccer ball. Facts about them are dropped in casually here and there without overwhelming, the way kids learn best.
There's also a trip to a petting zoo, where llamas show what good kissers they are and where a blindfolded Martin has to identify a sheep from two other animals by feel alone. The show is hyperactive, unstructured, a mishmash of live-action, claymation, puppetry, and cartoon, but those goofy Kratt brothers pull it off with the help of their chatty lemur pal, Zoboomafoo.
Bear in the Big Blue House fans might like to tune in just to see what a real lemur looks like. No, they're not lime green with blue feet and ears, but they're plenty cute all the same. For more cute creatures, see Zoboomafoo: Zoboo's Little Pals.
Rate It!
| Content | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CS | adults | kids | ||
Sexual Content |
 |
|||
Violence |
|
|||
Language |
|
|||
Message |
|
|||
Social BehaviorThis is educational, environmentally conscious, ecologically friendly stuff. |
 |
|||
Commercialism |
 |
|||
Drug/Alcohol/Tobacco |
|
|||
