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March of the Penguins Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG Theater release: June 24, 2005 by Warner Independent Pictures Directed by: Luc Jacquet Runtime: 1 hour 24 minutes Cast: Morgan Freeman (narrator), and lots of penguins Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

They say actors should never work with animals, but for directors who are gifted with patience, curiosity, and a keen eye for the nuances of spontaneous behavior, there are few better subjects. The French have proved to be particularly good at such films, and in recent years they have treated us to such nature flicks as Microcosmos and Winged Migration. Now we can add March of the Penguins, Luc Jacquet's documentary about the breeding habits of one of the world's largest flightless birds, to the menagerie.

The film should find an especially appreciative audience among younger children and their parents. There is something naturally funny about penguins—the way they waddle as though their pants won't stay up, the way their elegant appearance seems at odds with their clumsiness—and the children at the screening I attended found it all quite amusing. For parents, the educational value of the film (it's produced by National Geographic) is a definite bonus.

The family that waddles together, stays together

The story begins in March, when the southern hemisphere's summer comes to an end and the birds begin their slow, single-file march towards the old breeding grounds. Their pilgrimage ends dozens of miles from the water, in a place where the ice floor is thick and safe, and the walls surrounding the penguins can protect them from the wind. The birds spend some weeks looking for mates (the males are in short supply, so the females tend to fight over them), and in June, the lucky mothers give birth to an egg.

The film goes out of its way to stress the commonalities between penguins and their human observers. Emperor penguins are serially monogamous, finding a different partner every year but sticking to that partner for the duration of the mating season; and since the film covers only one of these seasons, it can hold a mirror of sorts up to human families by following the travails of a single penguin "family," showing how father and mother take turns incubating the egg and finding food for the chick.

Nothing like a little TLC from a parent

This is a more hazardous process than you might expect. Each parent will go without food for weeks or months at a time so that he or she can watch the egg or chick while the other parent goes back to the sea (which is now even further away, thanks to the growing ice shelf) in search of fish, krill, and other bits of food with which to feed their young. But the egg—which stays safe from the elements by resting on the parents' feet and under the parents' rather fat bellies—must never touch the ice, or else it will freeze, crack, and bring a premature end to the family unit. When the parents exchange duties, they must therefore pass the egg between them through a delicate shuffle of their oversized feet.

Matters are complicated further by predators. The female penguins, having lost so much of their body weight just laying the egg, are the first to go back to the sea; but the leopard seals that lurk there eat penguins just as penguins eat fish, and narrator Morgan Freeman tells us that the seal that kills a penguin takes not only her life, but also "that of her unborn chick, who will never be fed."

Does it get any cuter than this

When the chicks have hatched and learned to walk, they are assaulted by other birds that fly in and peck at their necks. A bereaved mother also tries to steal another penguin's chick after her own child freezes to death, but the group won't allow it; the other penguins gang up on her and fight her back. Scenes like these may cause young children a bit of anxiety, but they are handled with discretion.

Visually, the film is a bit of a mixed bag. Jacquete captures some striking images, ranging from the epic to the intimate, from the penguins' long shuffling pilgrimage across the barren ice to the dense texture of the penguins' feathers; but some of the footage also has the tacky look of digital video, especially where the underwater scenes are concerned.

Penguins on the march

The film also suffers from a tendency to impose human emotion on its creatures. Freeman's narration, written by Jordan Roberts (Around the Bend), tells us things like "the pain is unbearable" and "the reunion is a joyful one." While these particular descriptions may be warranted by the animal behavior on display, we might wonder if the film goes too far in calling itself a "love story," as opposed to a story about, say, primal reproductive instincts. (Is it really love if the characters have different sexual partners every year?) Then again, the original French version of this film was reportedly even more extreme in this regard; instead of an objective narrator, it had three actors providing the inner thoughts of the mama, papa, and baby penguins.

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