Photo Credit: Jeff Wilson
Just looking at them can bring on a smile. Penguins are comically serious looking creatures whose black and white plumage suggests a night at the opera from the last century. They waddle along in their bobbleheaded way, flapping their stubby wings like a pair of arms in motion. The endearing creatures are a natural subject for Disneynature, the conservation-minded documentary series from the studio whose fortunes were built on a lovable mouse.
Penguins is directed by nature-show veterans Alastair Fothergill and Jeff Wilson. The screenplay takes a well-worn path by following one representative of a species, endowing him with a name and a human personality. Penguins’ star is an Adelie penguin called Steve. He’s five years old (roughly 18 in people years) and as hot-to-trot as a human teenager. The movie is about Steve’s coming of age, his first time on the spring mating migration that draws uncounted numbers of penguins to Antarctica. For older penguins, it’s an annual opportunity to reconnect with their mates. For newbies like Steve, it starts as an outdoor singles bar on ice and ends in creating a family.
The question hangs over the opening scenes: Will Steve encounter the female Adelie of his dreams?
The voiceover narration is corny, especially when giving speech to our winged protagonist. “Hi, my name is Steve,” he’s made to say, nervously, when an attractive female penguin passes by. But in trying to make education fun, the cringe-worthy folksiness opens a window onto a particular species and their habits. Who knew that penguins build nests with little stones to elevate their eggs above ground level? Or that while clumsy on land, in water they dart like fish and leap like dolphins? Or that penguins battle each other—a knife-fight on the sharp edges of their beaks—over nesting sites and even nesting stones. It’s survival of the vicious.
As with other movies of its ilk, Penguins is a feat of photography, not only for the close-ups of its subjects (how do they avoid scaring the animals?) but for the panorama of the natural settings. The Antarctic of Penguins is beautiful and vast, an endless white horizon capped by the bright blue dome of an infinite sky.
