There is something unnerving about watching a polar bear stalk across floating sea ice high in the Arctic and doing so from the frigid waters directly beneath the bear, the world's largest four-legged predator.
Overhead, through ice so thin that it is transparent, plate-size paws set down, one after the other, as the half-ton animal pursues its prey.
Gripping moments like this abound in Arctic Tale, a new film exploring challenges facing polar bears and walruses, two familiar denizens of the icy, but warming, seas at the top of the world. But Arctic Tale is not a typical addition to a lengthening line of somber documentaries on dangerous or endangered wildlife.
Instead, Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson, a husband and wife who have spent the better part of two decades filming the Arctic's hulking, reclusive and sometimes deadly mammals for television nature shows, sifted through more than 800 hours of their own footage and that of other filmmakers to assemble a fictional, family-friendly coming-of-age tale.
laughter and tears
The film follows this unorthodox gambit to tell of the entwined lives and travails of two composite characters, Nanu, a young bear, and Seela, a walrus. Their stories are related, fable style, by Queen Latifah, and include scenes ranging from the wrenching, when a bear cub falters and fades in a relentless blizzard, to the comic, when a heap of basking walruses erupt into a flatulent chorus after bingeing on clams. (An adult can eat 4,000 a day.)
Arctic Tale is clearly aimed at the same audiences that flocked in unexpected numbers to An Inconvenient Truth, which chronicled Al Gore's climate campaign, and March of the Penguins, which followed the life cycle of rugged inhabitants from the other frozen end of the world. But Adam Leipzig, the president of National Geographic Films, which produced the film, said the project was conceived two years ago, before either documentary became a hit. The idea, he said, was to make a wildlife film "that really holds up as a movie." (Paramount Classics will release the film in the US in mid-August.)
Some early reviews have questioned the value of assembling footage of various animals at different life stages to construct artificial life stories complete with human-like villains and heroes, including a walrus Auntie who gives her life in defense of Seela.
The trade newspaper Variety noted that "the anthropomorphism is relentless, as animal communities are mined for their most recognizably human characteristics - not hard to do, given the outsized personalities of the main subjects."
Leipzig defended the approach, saying the goal was to create a new genre of "wildlife adventure" movies.
docu-soap
"It isn't fictionalized in the way that Transformers is fictionalized," Leipzig said. "This genre is movies about the creatures of the world as they actually exist, with their real behaviors documented by the foremost wildlife cinematographers in the world and crafted into stories that can entertain and educate audiences and where there are deep resonances that audiences can respond to."
Ravetch, like Leipzig, sees the emotional power of the film flowing from the images and moments more than the imagined story.
"When you see a mother hug an animal, that's undeniably an act of emotion and caring," he said. "In the scene where a mother polar bear has to cast off the baby because she can't fend for the both of them anymore, it's got sort of that tough-love feel. But you see that emotion in the footage."
RSS