While anticipation among local movie fans has lately been focused on the imminent release of “The Five Year Engagement,” filmed mostly in Ann Arbor last year, another major movie release has a local tie: University of Michigan anthropology professor John Mitani worked as a scientific consultant for the Disneynature film “Chimpanzee,” which opens in theaters today.

Following on the heels of Disneynature’s previous films—“Earth,” “Oceans,” and “African Cats”—“Chimpanzee” features footage of the chimpanzees that Mitani has been studying in Uganda for nearly 20 years.

"The chimpanzees that I study are a large troop, about 180 strong, and with so many males, they frequently interact aggressively with other chimpanzees who live in neighboring groups," Mitani said in a press release.

The film focuses on an infant chimp named Oscar, who’s left to fend for himself when Freddy, the alpha male, adopts Oscar—a rare occurrence previously unseen on film.

"Orphaned infants are often adopted by older siblings, or by other members in their groups," Mitani said in the same press relase. "But Freddy has no relationship that we know of to Oscar. That's the mystery."

“Chimpanzee” took four years to make—3 years of shooting, on and off, and one year for post-production.

Was Mitani concerned a film crew and lots of equipment would cause a great disruption among the chimpanzees?

“I can honestly say that might have been a concern at the start, especially because—although in the past (the chimpanzees) had been filmed quite a bit for nature documentaries, none of those have involved the kinds of teams that were involved in this particular case,” Mitani told AnnArbor.com. “Because you can’t even believe the kinds of equipment that they used for this. Television documentaries—they’re just using relatively small cameras that most people could deal with, but apparently those—you use those, and it’s just going to be good enough to show up on the big screen. So they’re using state of the art technology, where these cameras are over a meter long and tripods weigh up to 70 pounds. It was pretty crazy. But they did get some spectacular, rare footage as a result.”

Mitani noted that the chimps consistently adapt well to the presence of humans, even in large groups.

“One of the scenes in the film, one of the opening scenes is shot from the tree canopy, and we had a tree climber come out to set up a tree platform,” said Mitani. “One of the concerns there was, how were (the chimpanzees) going to react to us 30 meters up? Not at all. It was really quite remarkable.”

Mitani recently attended the premiere of “Chimpanzee” in Orlando, Florida.

What did he think?

“I’m actually quite happy,” Mitani said. “ … I can really say that some of the stuff that you’ll see in the film is spectacular, and the cinematography, the footage is stunning in parts. I’m not sure it would be easily re-captured or done again. The effort that was put into this is really quite mindboggling, if you think about it.”

Tim Allen—a familiar voice to kids, thanks to the “Toy Story” films—provides the film’s narration, and Mitani never appears on screen.

“There are no people in this film,” Mitani explained. “It’s all about chimps. And that was really important to me.”

Here's the film's trailer.

Jenn McKee is the entertainment digital journalist for AnnArbor.com. Reach her at jennmckee@annarbor.com or 734-623-2546, and follow her on Twitter @jennmckee.