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Earth Our rating: Your rating:   Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: G Genre: Documentary Theater release: April 22, 2009 by Disneynature Directed by: Alistair Fothergill, Mark Linfield Runtime: 1 hour 25 minutes Cast: James Earl Jones (narrator) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Earth, the first release from Disneynature films, is 85 minutes of jaw-droppingly beautiful clouds, waterfalls, icebergs, and savannahs; of graceful animals, scary animals, funny animals, and excruciatingly cute baby animals. James Earl Jones delivers a narration that is mild and accessible to children. (A typical line: after a shot of a penguin sliding on his belly, Jones says, "You might not know this, but penguins are one of the few creatures born with a built-in toboggan.") It reopens the tradition of Disney nature documentaries, as in the "True Life Adventures" films of 1948-1960, and a better family-friendly nature film can't be found.

I know how enrapturing travel documentaries can be; after viewing one in fifth grade, I came home and told my mother that I really, really wanted to go see New Jersey, the Garden State. What makes Earth different from all previous documentaries, however, is the advances in technology which enable never-before-possible footage. A Cineflex mount that holds a camera steady underneath a helicopter (collectors of odd words will be delighted to learn that it's called a "heligimbal") made it possible to film sequences that would be otherwise inaccessible to, or unsafe for, humans. A scene of wolves hunting caribou, for instance, was filmed from above, one kilometer away. The heligimbal also enables a dizzying shot in which the audience is carried over the edge of a waterfall and then looks back at it, head-downward. That kind of thing, I have to admit, puts New Jersey in the shade.

A view from under the ice

The film is the work of Alistair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, both of whom have worked in the BBC's Natural History Unit (Fothergill was its head from 1992-1998). Some filmgoers have noticed that they've seen some of this footage before, in the BBC-Discovery Channel miniseries Planet Earth. At a press conference following the screening, Fothergill explained that the movie and TV projects were commissioned at the same time, and some material appears in both, though employed to tell different stories. It took five years to complete filming, with 2000 days in the field. An audience member asked whether Fothergill and Linfield had to do much editing. The answer was yes.

Earth is structured around the migrations of three animal families: a polar bear and cubs, an elephant and calf, and a humpback whale and her milk-guzzling baby (150 gallons a day). Each family must migrate in search of food (or, in the case of the elephants, water), and each faces danger along the way. There are poignant moments; a dust cloud descends upon the elephants, and when it lifts one calf is seen all alone, still following his mother's footprints, but now going in the wrong direction. Yet, while never denying the harsh truths of the "circle of life," the film does not include bloody scenes of slaughter. We see a cheetah race toward its prey, a young deer-like creature, and as it draws closer the little one stumbles and cannot regain his footing. The cheetah overtakes the deer, surrounding it in an embrace that looks balletic and almost tender. At that moment the camera cuts away, and every parent in the audience stifled a cheer.

Yes, elephants can be good swimmers

That sort of delicacy is deliberate, according to Linfield: "If any parents at all thought that they couldn't bring their children to see this, because we'd put a little bit of blood in there, that would be a shame." After all, we can come to see that nature must be "red in tooth and claw" without having to see it full-screen. After rooting for one creature or another to survive throughout the film, we are confronted at the end with a dilemma that has no obvious resolution. We don't want the polar bear, whom the narrator calls "Dad," to die of starvation, yet we don't want him to succeed in killing a walrus pup either. The ambivalence the audience experiences at this point is instructive; we grasp, quietly and surely, that earthly life is compelled to subsist on death. Yet when the moment of truth came, it was depicted so subtly that I didn't at first catch what had transpired. Well done!

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