Happy fifth of July!

posted: 7:20:26 PM  

March of the Penguins is a polished, genial nature documentary that's good fare for the kids on a weekend afternoon. It follows a colony of Emperor Penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) in Antarctica through the course of one breeding season.

Clocking in at 80 minutes, and containing a few scenes of (heavily sanitized) violence—predation by a skua and by a toothy leopard seal—the movie may be rough going for smaller kids. But the film makers extract a couple of scenes of comedy from their extensive footage, as they watch the charismatic birds waddle to and fro, from the edge of the sea ice to the breeding ground, 70 miles away.

It's inevitable that the film will anthropomorphize these hobbit-height provisional bipeds, so it's best to play along. Do the incubating males, huddled together for warmth in a driving snowstorm, resemble a gang of Green Bay Packers fans midway through a bitter fourth quarter? Or does the mass of proud fathers, alert to the rearrival of their mates, look like the crowd of Islamic pilgrims circling around the Kaaba? Or, in an opening extreme long shot, heat mirage distorted, do the wandering black-backed birds remind us of hired gunslingers striding across the Arizona desert? No matter.

It's easy to overlook the accomplishments of DPs Laurent Chalet and Jérôme Maison, among them shooting in the constant twilight of the Antartica winter; catching adorable frame-filling closeups of the penguin chicks; and mounting a "penguincam" on a bird for some brief underwater views of feeding under the ice.

posted: 7:02:08 PM