The cries of a child who lost her mother would not be so different from the screams of a chimp seeing her mother being shot with a tranquilizer gun. A minute after clicking the play button of this documentary, Project Nim (2011), the audience would be frozen by the grim mood of the movie in which a baby chimp is being taken away from its mother. This scene implies just the beginning of how humans tried to turn the chimpanzee Nim into a human in inhuman ways. 
 

"Can animals learn sign language and use that knowledge to make a full grammatical sentence?" was the question that triggered Professor Herb Terrace of Columbia University to conduct an experiment on Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee. Nim, born in 1973, became the subject for a study on animal language acquisition ever since he was two weeks old. Instead of the warmth and wildness that he should have experienced, Nim was brought to the Lafarge family to be raised as a human child and learn sign language.
 

The entire documentary consists of interviews from people that had interaction with Nim one time or another. The way in which they are sitting in a black room and conducting their interview seems to reflect how each person shows an unconcerned attitude to Nim in some way. In addition, the director deliberately creates an atmosphere in which the humans seem to be superior of the chimpanzee. Scenes of humans sitting peacefully on their chairs all throughout the interview are in sharp contrast with Nim’s dramatic life, owing its cause to human beings.
 

An interesting point to note is how there are so many interviewees who nurtured Nim for a particular period of time. In other words, other than Herb, the people appearing on the screen continuously change, implying how no more than one person actually had stayed with Nim for a long period of time. This displaying effect seems to imply how Project Nim was a complete failure in achieving its first goal of "raising Nim as if it were a real child." If the people had actually thought of Nim as a human baby or as a child of their own, they would not have turned their backs on Nim and left him to be cared for by a different person every time he caused trouble.

 

Herb, the only person who appears in the interviews all throughout the movie, was neither the warmest person toward Nim, nor had a strong will to finish the project. Rather, one would notice that he is constantly justifying himself for what he has done to Nim saying, “I never thought of him as my own child.” Even though he was the one who brought Nim into the scientific world for his experiment, this passive attitude of Herb is yet another interesting factor for the audience to catch as the audience will easily be able to understand the gap between his words and his actual attitude toward Nim. 

 

   
▲ Project of Project Nim where Nim is holding out his hand to reach a human. Provided by cinedork.com

People who are looking forward to knowing the capabilities of an animal to learn sign language should not watch this movie. This is not because Nim failed to learn any sign language or that there was nothing interesting about the learning process of the animal. Rather, the movie is about the dramatic life of the poor chimpanzee Nim who had been under the control of humans the moment he was born. The information about the development in Nim's linguistic abilities does not take much part in the whole story of the movie. Therefore, although the film successfully shows the environment in which an experiment is being conducted and how humans are numb to it, it fails to fulfill its intended task in showing the scientific outcomes of the project.

 

In other words, although the name of the movie is Project Nim, there seems to be no actual rule or teaching method that was properly established for it to be called as a meaningful project. Herb simply hires female teachers to teach Nim for some time before they leave. Such lack of rules was clearly emphasized in the movie to conduct the message that this was not a real project. Whether the director deliberately used the word project in the name or not, it is the audience’ job to determine whether Nim was in a scientific project to broaden human's perspectives on animal's language acquisition or merely a game to see how people can deal with a wild animal.

 
Maybe the name of the film should have been changed to Project Humans as the entire story focuses on how Nim influences the people around him, rather than how the chimpanzee himself was infleunced. If Herb and his assistants had experimented on Nim, the director of this film seems to be having his own test on humans under the excuse that he is making a movie. Although the various manners of humans during the conditions were truly interesting to watch, the director should have put in more strength in giving a brief answer to the ultimate question of whether chimpanzees can make a full grammatical sentence using sign language.

 
After watching the movie, one would naturally wonder who is the wild animal—Nim or the humans. Even though people might have abandoned Nim due to the fact that he had been some nuisance, when taking a deeper look into the movie, one would realize that it was actually the people who had completely changed his life into one that could not fit into the lives of neither humans nor wild animals. Instead of the question, “Can wild animals learn sign language,” the experimenters should have asked, “Are we able to take responsibility for the life of this animal?” before separating Nim from the protection of his mother.
 

Film Information

Title: Project Nim (2011)

Running time: 94 minutes

Director: James Marsh

Release Date: 2011.7.8

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