ARCTIC TALE
Reviewed by Sam Hatch
Arctic Tale is a kid-friendly documentary that rides on the tuxedoed coattails of the 2005 megahit March of the Penguins. Realizing that dichromatic waddling waterfowl are officially passé, filmmakers Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson have turned their cameras onto a set of super cute and cuddly polar bears, and a family of fugly, wrinkled walruses (shouldn't it be walri?). It follows the triumphs, trials and tribulations of a baby from each species through a multi-year period into adulthood. The newborn polar bear is named Nanu, and the bewhiskered walrus youth Seela. But there's a catch.
There is no Nanu and no Seela. They're character composites taken from fifteen years' worth of location footage totaling eight-hundred hours. Whereas March of the Penguins was a genuine documentary that highlighted the very unusual mating cycle of the Antarctic Emperor Penguin, Arctic Tale is a faux-doc whose primary purpose is getting kids interested in the topique du jour of Global Warming.
For a bait-and-switch cheat, it's an entertaining one. Ravetch and Robinson have captured some truly unique footage, and when the polar bears' mum goes stomping for a fur seal dinner, you truly feel like a piece of meat trapped in the ice. There's also some great footage of cute cubs inside their snowy dens – just photoshop ‘I baked you a cookie but I eated it' onto their likeness and they're perfect for posting on your refrigerator door of choice. The walruses receive some fancy footage as well, mostly up close and personal moments under the surface of the ocean as they frolic (and come dangerously close to death numerous times).
There's also a fuzzy white arctic fox looking for scraps in the wake of the bears, but was he really there? You never see them all on screen at the same time, so I smell some shenanigans with that one. It's interesting how the film asks you to side with animals on multiple levels of the food chain, for as the film progresses you have a vested interest in both the floppy walruses and the tremendous snow-furred beasts who would like nothing more than to insert tasty walrus snacks into their gaping maws. It's a film where everyone gets to be the protagonist for a while.
This lesson of nature's life cycle will surely be overshadowed by the ecological message writ large across the screen, but it may help children grasp the concept of death in a relatively un-scary fashion. Kids, if you want the cute little bear to live, the cute little fur seal has got to go. Them's the breaks. Though in a way it's still lighter than your average Disney fare where the parents are slain quickly and violently before the eyes of their offspring.
There is a high level of levity on display as well, mainly during the first half. For those parents who thought they had escaped the cartoon doldrums of potty humored kids fare, you might want to refill your sodas during the extensive walrus fart-a-thon (called a game of ‘pull my flipper' by narrator Queen Latifah). The noisy beasts also delight in some interesting underwater musical compositions as the males attempt serenading reluctant ladies with their smooth jams.
Queen Latifah reads a kid-friendly narration loaded with hip ‘street' lingo. (At least the animals don't ‘talk' like in the original French version of March of the Penguins) The script was written by Linda Woolverton, Mose Richards and Kristen Gore (who is indeed the daughter of Al ‘Slideshow-Warrior' Gore.) As the film progresses, the Gore family message about melting icecaps grows larger. The polar animals are seen forced to abandon their homes altogether as the winters grow too short and ice shelves fail to coalesce as they used to. Both the walruses and polar bears swim outrageous distances out of desperation, seeking shelter on a rocky island out in the middle of nowhere.
With their shelter, hunting ground and food supply compromised the film ultimately leaves you with the message that these fuzzy little buggers are screwed, and it's pretty much your fault. During the end credits a series of children appear to give their peers helpful tips on implementing change. While on one hand it's an effective tool, on the other it plays like it's trying to get kids hooked on conservation, so they'll bug their parents for another fix of 'save the polar bear'.
This thin ruse is most apparent during the helpful suggestion that 'you buy a hybrid car'. I don't know about you, but I know absolutely zero ten year olds who are in the market for a new car, hybrid or otherwise. So the name of the game is pestering your parents to trade in their SUV until they relent. Just don't expect any great presents for your birthday that year, since your folks will probably claim that gifts are bad for the environment.
All kidding aside, it's a decent film, if not a smashing documentary. It wants you to know that it's from the same people who brought you March of the Penguins, but it's nowhere near as pure a film as that one. The footage was also surprisingly grainy, which sometimes distracted from the wondrous imagery at hand. Perhaps I've been too spoiled by IMAX features such as Deep Sea 3-D or even the insanely cool HD series Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel. Still, if you want your child to learn a thing or two in between utterances of ‘awww' and ‘she's sooo cuuute!' load up the family hybrid and check out Arctic Tale.