March of the Penguins
Review by Peter T. Chattaway | posted 6/24/2005
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March of the Penguins
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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
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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."
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