Although lacking the lyric force of “March of the Penguins” and “Winged Migration,” the film combines a great story with world-class photography to tell a unique National Geographic tale
Although lacking the lyric force of “March of the Penguins” and “Winged Migration,” the film combines a great story with world-class photography to tell a unique National Geographic tale
If you thought those birds had it tough in “March of the Penguins” you will have to see National Geographic Films’ latest addition to their spectacular library of unbelievable photography, “Arctic Tale.” Teaming up with Paramount Classics, the studio that brought us “An Inconvenient Truth,” the film stars an adult female polar bear and her two cubs and an adult female walrus and her pup. It tells the story of how they meet under the strangest, and most dangerous, of circumstances: the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Although the film does not match the spooky human/penguin physical connection of “March,” it tells secrets we all need to hear.
The life of the average polar bear in the Artic would seem to be pleasant enough; they are the kings of the jungle, so to speak, although there is no jungle. They are kings of all they survey, which is a lot. They live on ice, swim in ice-water and are quite comfortable in a blowing wind of zero degrees Fahrenheit. If they itch, a nice slide down an ice hill followed by a nap in the snow makes things right. They have one of the strongest senses of smell on the planet. It is well known that grizzly bears have a sense of smell far better than the dogs that hunt them. But how many people know that polar bears can smell the scent of a seal through three feet of ice? Now that is a sense of smell. So what happens when the bear smells the prey below the ice? You won’t believe it until you see it.
So since they have no lethal enemies and can smell and eat anything that moves within miles, what threatens the bear? You guessed it, global warming and the continued thinning and breaking up of the Arctic ice. As the ice breaks up, the bears have fewer places to roam, hunt and give birth. As their territory shrinks, they are isolated from their prey, such as walruses, and forced to swim for miles in ice-slurry brine that would kill an unprotected human in about two minutes. Sometimes they don’t survive the swim. If they have cubs, the decreased hunting means their cubs may die from lack of food. The failing Artic ice sheet does not kill the bear outright, but the end effect is to reduce the survival rate of the cubs. Fewer cubs, less food, more energy expended to hunt---it all adds up to increased survival pressure.
It used to be that Walruses also had it pretty good, having few predators other than the polar bear and being able to suck the meat out of some 4000 clams per day. But even though they are comfortable in sub-freezing brine they, too, need a solid surface upon which to rest and raise their young. As in the case with the bears, it is the young that suffer the most from the disappearing ice shelf. In some of the amazing photography in the film, the group of walruses is tracked on a do-or-die marathon swim to Rock Island, where they rest and their young develop the energy and insulation reserves they need to survive in freezing water. They are forced on the swim because their ice island melted out from under them; something that never happened before. Without the land, the young will die because they can not withstand the heat loss for extended periods and, like bear cubs, they can not eat enough to store a season’s worth of energy.
But there’s more to the story than that. An adult male bear also finds himself trapped amongst the shifting ice slurry that was once limitless hunting territory. There is no hunting for him there, so he also makes the nearly impossible journey across miles of icy sea in search of prey. On the way he must stop at whatever car-sized ice-chunks he can find to rest on; if nothing appears that is large enough for him, he dies. Finally he reaches Rock Island and attacks the walruses in his own do-or-die hunt as they fight back with their two foot long tusks. The photographs of the bears and the walruses swimming amongst the endless landscape of useless floating ice scraps, looking for solid ice, is an scary as it is breathtaking.
With guest stars the thick-billed murres and the arctic white fox (who has a surprisingly synergistic long-term relationship to the bear) and some of the best photography of the unicorn-horned narwhals ever on screen, this film is great family fare. The predation is toned down to a very inoffensive level and will not cause the 4-8 year-olds nightmares (the bird attack on the baby penguins in “March” does not happen in this film) Truly amazing work by sub-zero scuba diver cameraman Adam Ravetch and partner/director Sarah Robertson. Queen Latifah narrates.
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