Originally published 7/9/2005
March of the Penguins
Director: Luc Jacquet
Writers: Story by Luc Jacquet, Screenplay by Michel Fessler and Luc Jacquet, Narration by Jordan Roberts
Producers: Yves Darndeau, Christophe Lioud, Emmanuel Priou
Stars: Morgan Freeman, Emperor Penguins
Penguins are among the most anthropomorphized creatures in nature, and it is both easy and amusing to spot what makes them so oddly familiar and relatable to us. The walking upright helps, as is their strange gait, which is both slumped over and somehow jaunty, as if they are going about a very hard and menial job but are determined to see it through with energy. We know what that feels like. Then there is their elaborate and eccentric mating rituals, and the way you could swear they were slipping some playful fun in between all their strutting around, diving in and out of water, and slapping each other.
March of the Penguins, an entertaining and inspiring documentary from National Geographic, takes us to Antarctica and the feeding and nesting grounds of the giant Emperor Penguins. You leave with more respect for these creatures; they no longer seem so goofy, but rather stubbornly, miraculously adapted to keep on living in what the movie describes as “the darkest, driest, windiest, coldest place in the world.”
Narrated by Morgan Freeman and culled together by editor Sabine Emiliani from over 120 hours of footage, this feature concisely and informatively covers the extraordinary year-long mating and birthing cycle, starting from the moment the whole colony bursts out of the water and sets out, single-file, on a determined march to their mating grounds. They cannot stop for food or rest and the walk can take well over a week. Since their entire world is ice which melts, is blown around, and re-freezes every year, some deeper instinct is in place to help them find their safe haven (safe because the ice is too thick to melt underneath them and the high walls rob the wind of some of its bite). Sometimes they get stuck and you watch them stand still, heads darting around, until one of them somehow figures it out and off they go again. And this is, by far, the easy part.
I could not count the number of times I thought I had heard the worst tribulation to be endured, or the number of times some bizarre behavior was explained by the simple statement – “They must. Or they will die.” Every aspect of their habits is the sum of thousands of generations of hard lessons learned in the face of no other options.
How astonishing for a male to go without food for four months as they choose a mate, conceive, then huddle together by the thousands guarding their individual eggs (keeping them tucked between the tops of their toes and their bellies, as contact with the ice will freeze them) through the harshest weather of the year as their “wives” struggle back to the water to fatten up. How much more astonishing to hear that, as they starve themselves, they are storing a small bit of food in their throats to feed their chicks when they hatch. This food will last the newborns only a day or two, which through the wonder of evolution is when the mothers, responding to some unknown signal, have marched back from the water.
There is a shot early on where you see one of these parades from a distance and think it’s an impressive number of penguins. Then it keeps panning across, and across, and across, until you realize you are witnessing an entire vast civilization trekking one-by-one through a land which is essentially a dead planet unto itself. And that any penguin which can avoid getting lost, or starving, or being eaten by a leopard seal, or freezing to death in any of a dozen ways, has earned a bit of lolling around in the water.
There are times where the narration works too hard to reach for an emotional point, and it rings false for the filmmakers to suggest that this journey is taken out of love. It is taken because it’s what works. You invest most in our heroes’ lives when the filmmakers keep things simple. They do not hide the fact that many hazards exist, and that many of the colony will not survive this unforgiving process. The stark and somehow beautiful Antarctica is shown with an unglamorizing but admiring eye. The penguins clearly win out in the end, as they are still here long after every other species on this formerly tropical continent gave up. That hopeful spirit, and the adorable creatures themselves, make March of the Penguins ideal family fare, even if there is a sex scene (which is more tender than you might expect).
Over the end credits we see footage of the camera operators setting up their equipment, lurching around on skis, bundled in jackets. They look awkward, out-of-sorts, and miserably cold. The penguins don’t seem to pay them much mind. Scientifically, this is probably because they don’t have much energy to waste on these mysterious creatures if they are not trying to eat penguins. But you watch the two species regard each other and almost cannot help imagine the penguins thinking bemusedly – if you want to get by here, stick around a million years and evolve into us if you can. It’s the only way, really.