I screened Charles the DVD of the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins. This was a documentary about the elaborate process the emperor penguins of Antarctica have to go through to reproduce — they have to walk across 70 miles of ice from the shores of Antarctica (where they usually live since they need to be near water so they can dive into the water and catch the fish and krill they survive by eating), where they set up what amounts to a giant cruise bar for penguins. A male penguin and a female penguin hook up, they have sex, and the female lays an egg which for some evolutionary reason I can’t fathom she then has to shove into the body cavity of the male, where it spends about four months before the male hatches it (so emperor penguins are one species in which it’s the males that give birth!) while the females walk back the 70 miles to their original home by the sea (which is now a few miles more distant because there’s more of an ice cover over the salt water)a and eat enough fish not only for themselves but also to take back to the Penguin Cruise Bar and feed it to their newborn young.
March of the Penguins, made by a French crew in Terre Adélie (part of the section of Antarctica administratively assigned to France) and directed by Luc Jacquet, was a surprise hit at the time — in the U.S. it grossed over $77 million, more than any of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture that year — though I bypassed it, I suspect because I’d been bored by a previous French-made documentary about wild birds, Winged Migration. I’d seen Winged Migration at a press screening and reviewed it for Zenger’s Newsmagazine, and I’d written, “[I]t’s just way too much of a good thing. There are shots here of almost unearthly beauty, but, especially in the second half, every flock of winged migrators looks an awful lot like every other flock of winged migrators[1] and only the printed subtitles and the heavily French-accented narration (credited to filmmaker [Jacques] Perrin in the press kit but to someone else on screen) tell us where we are and what sorts of birds we’re watching.” I liked March of the Penguins considerably better than Winged Migration, and I suspect it was because it dealt with only one species of bird and told a continuous story about one particularly dramatic phase of its lifestyle. It did have some of the flaws of “pop” nature documentaries, including the attempt through the writing and editing to create artificial “heroes” and “villains” in nature — in this case the primary villains are seals, seagulls and ducks, who prey on penguins and particularly try to eat the newborn ones who can’t really fight back — and the cutesy-poo narration, delivered in his best éminence noir tones by Morgan Freeman and written by Jordan Roberts. I have a feeling I’d have liked the original French version even less, since according to imdb.com it not only had a third-person human narrator but actually supplied dialogue for the penguins.
I also thought that, as amazing as the shots of the penguins walking across Antarctica to their spawning grounds were (even though I couldn’t help but joke about the sheer amount of trouble and effort penguins have to go through just to get laid!), the true highlights of the film in terms of sheer beauty were the shots of penguins swimming under water and catching and eating the fish they need to survive. (But then, as Charles pointed out to me, the film was not called Swim of the Penguins.) Also on the DVD were a couple of extras about its making, which we bypassed, and two bonus items we did watch: the original theatrical trailer and a 1949 Bugs Bunny short called Eight-Ball Hare in which Bugs has to transport a lost carnival penguin to the South Pole — there were three appearances by a caricature of Humphrey Bogart as he looked in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, appealing to Bugs with his line from the early part of that film, “Can’t you help out a fellow American who’s down on his luck?” One quirky — and rather jarring — aspect of March of the Penguins was that its opening and closing credits were printed in the same type face as the main credits for the various Law and Order TV shows; another is that there was actually a sequel made in 2017, while shortly after the original was released comedian Stewart Lee came up with a spoof called Farce of the Penguins (which I suspect was just the original March of the Penguins with a new soundtrack and comedy narration dubbed in à la What’s Up, Tiger Lily?). I was also amused that the credited production companies were National Geographic Films, Bonne Pioche (the word “pioche” is French for a pickaxe or a pile of cards, neither of which seems applicable to this film) and something called Wild Bunch — which made me wonder if the film was going to end with some Old West gunmen slaughtering the penguins in slow motion.
[1] — A line I actually ripped off from Allan Sherman’s
liner notes to his album with the Boston “Pops” Orchestra: “The end of every
symphony sounds like the end of every other symphony, and goes on forever,
which is more time than I like to spend in a concert hall.”
