The Tuxedo

What is it about the French and documentaries about animals? I went into March of the Penguins thinking it was the same folks that produced Winged Migration and Microcosmos. A quick perusal of IMDB shows that it's not. Three different groups of people did each of the documentaries.

Documentaries about animals can be challenging. People want to watch films where they are entertained. One form of entertainment is to be educated. Ask yourself, what do you know about penguins? Most would respond that they live in the South Pole, waddle around, swim, but don't fly, and are kinda cute. That's about it. Penguins seem so familiar that we don't think about them very much.

But think about it. Why would these birds live in the South Pole? It's frickin cold down there!

The answer, as it is, is that the South Pole wasn't always so icy and apparently it was green at some point in the past. Over time, however, it became icy, and most life no longer lives there, except these penguins.

And what a mad life it is!

To mate, penguins head to Antarctica, walk 70 miles over ice (that's walk), to a breeding ground. They pair off (somehow), and attempt to produce an egg. The egg must be kept constantly warm, otherwise it freezes. This is done by propping the egg on the feet and using the bottom of the penguin to sit on the egg.

Once the female has produced the egg, she eventually transfers it to the male to keep warm. The females then walk back 70 miles or more to the water so they can feed, and return back food to the child. The male must keep the child warm for a long time. Once the female returns, they have food in their mouths (somehow) and feed this to the hatched baby penguins. The male must then walk the 70 miles so he can feed. Each of them takes their turns walking to get food, while the other stays behind to keep the young warm.

Snowstorms cause these penguins to huddle together to keep warm, and some do not make it.

March of the Penguins presents the story in a dramatic arc. Although they don't pick any penguin in particular to follow, the story is about how these penguins go to the mating spot, reproduce, and try to raise the young over many months, often starving without food for months at a time. That these birds know where to go, then can go get food and come back, and find their mate again is nothing short of amazing.

After a while, you realize not only how beautiful and dangerous Antarctica is, you begin to realize how tough it must have been to make the film. Using close up photography, overhead shots, time lapsed images, you get a sense of how these crazy penguins live. The voiceover's done by ever-reliable Morgan Freeman, who reads a screenplay that injects some humor and drama at key points throughout.

Documentaries about animals succeed often when we, as humans, recognize human-like trials that animals go through. We see penguins mate in an unusual, almost alien form, and it makes us reflect on how we, as humans, mate. We see the kind of effort and devotion it takes for penguins to have their young survive, and we know that we would not be nearly this committed.

And certainly, we wonder how penguins could have evolved to such behavior. What makes them do such crazy things? Could it really only be in the last few centuries that penguins learned to do this?

If there was one thing, cinematically, that this documentary reminded me of, it was Lawrence of Arabia. In scene after scene, you see the band of Arabs cross a mighty desert. Lean often pulls back to show us the line of camels and men attempting to deal with the heat of northern Africa. Similar scenes are shown in the icy stark beauty that is the Antarctic. Icy winters are the equivalent of sandstorms, and where Lean shows the mad journey of a Englishman ready to help Arabs, March of the Penguins shows us the survival of a species. How they can depend on the same icy locale to be there year after year, and to find it year after year, is utterly fascinating and mind boggling.

Those penguins may be cute, but they lead a far harsher life than you're likely to imagine.