“Nature: Snowflake:The White Gorilla”

Tomorrow night at 8 on WNET

(two stars)

‘Snowflake” isn’t as cute as it looks.

It should have been. The albino gorilla named Snowflake is certainly adorable enough – for a gorilla.

He was the world’s only known all-white gorilla – or, at least, the only one ever seen by man in known human history.

Captured as a baby in 1967 by villagers in the then-Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa, Snowflake was acquired by the Barcelona Zoo, where he grew up and lived for the rest of his life. He died in 2003 from skin cancer, the result of overexposure to the sun, which can be harmful to albino animals and humans.

This documentary – premiering tomorrow night as part of PBS’ “Nature” – blames the thoughtlessness of zookeepers for permitting Snowflake to spend most of his life soaking up the bright sunlight of Barcelona, even if they probably should have known better.

In the documentary, the story of Snowflake serves as a jumping-off point for an examination of the plight of gorillas in the wild and in captivity.

If you happened to come across an ad for it, you might have thought this was a lovely nature show about a crowd-pleasing primate. You might even be encouraged to watch such a program with your small children.

And that would be a big mistake – unless you think your kids can benefit from seeing gorillas hacked to pieces with machetes and their flesh cooked over open flames.

Or how about the footage featured here of a village bazaar, where some of the stalls feature all manner of fly-covered “bush meat” for sale, including the carcasses of monkeys that have been skinned and readied whole for the stewpot.

And, of course, we’re shown older footage of the cruel capture of the first generations of baby gorillas that were sent to zoos earlier in the 20th century.

Their fully-grown parents were too strong to capture, the documentary says, so they were just slaughtered.

“Every gorilla in captivity was an orphan,” says the narrator, Michael Gross, in one of the documentary’s more illuminating moments.

However, in devoting much of its hourlong length to the topic of gorillas as zoo exhibits, “Snowflake” gives short shrift to the story of the beloved great ape whose name is the title of the show.