Penguins are cute, until nature has a say

Over the past month riders on Taipei's city buses have been bombarded with trailers of Luc Jacquet's film La Marche de l'Empreur (The Emperor's Journey). The trailer is heavy on shots of penguin chicks looking sleepy, clumsy, dopey and irresistibly cute.

As all successful marketers are aware, nothing draws a crowd like babies, and with the possible exception of tiger cubs or pandas, few animal species elicit coos in the same measure as penguin chicks. But the kids to whom this film is marketed will be in for a bit of a surprise when they watch the actual film.

Jacquet is a veteran of documentary who is familiar with the need for realism in shooting nature films, and in The Emperor's Journey he hasn't shied away from capturing the many predations that nature inflicts on penguins. The film begins with sweeping long shots of Antarctic landscapes that drive home the point that the intimidating, lonely environment will be as much a presence in the film as the penguins, which speak in sparing phrases through human narration.

The journey alluded to in the title is the back-and-forth trips that penguin males and females are forced to undertake between the seashore and their nesting grounds while incubating their single egg and then feeding the chick. The trip from the shore to the nesting ground is about a 30-day waddle, which the penguins do in single file lines that stretch in Jacquet's stunning images from one horizon to the next.

The cycle followed by the penguins and film crew is straightforward enough. The penguins emerge from the sea, waddle to the nesting ground, mate, lay an egg, then the mother rushes back to the ocean to feed and returns with a massively bloated belly from which comes the food to feed the newborn chick that hatched under the father's watch. Once the mother returns, it's the father's turn to rush to the ocean to feed and return with a stomach full of goodies for junior so that he can grow and the whole family can make the final trek back to the ocean, where they will separate and never see each other again.

The completion of the cycle, however, is contingent on the penguin family overcoming the many dangers they will face, foremost of which is the freezing temperature hovering at around -40℃ during the incubation period. Jacquet offers plenty of shots of frozen eggs abandoned next to the huddle of penguins escaping the blasting wind and of penguins freezing to death. Male penguins, it turns out, are also extremely dim-witted creatures that break their own eggs when they walk or forget about the egg they're incubating and simply walk away for a minute only for it to freeze.

Once chicks hatch they face attack from jealous penguins who've lost their own chicks and from birds of prey. The mothers and fathers, meanwhile, are picked off in huge numbers by Mother Nature during their treks back and forth to the ocean. One shot of a hungry sea lion attacking penguins is certain to be nightmare material for many kids.

Softening the blow of the raw shots of penguins succumbing to unpleasant deaths is the narration, which in its sentimentality leaves the impression that the star protagonist family is not only loving and caring, but, most importantly, survives. This could have been a clever editing construction, however, since to the untrained eye penguins tend to look all the same.