March of the Penguins

March of the Penguins (French: La Marche de l'empereur; literally The Emperor's March) is a commercially successful French documentary film which won the Academy Award for nature documentary by Luc Jacquet, co produced by Bonne Pioche and the National Geographic Society.

The film depicts the yearly journeys of the emperor penguins of Antarctica. In autumn, all the penguins of breeding age (five years old and over) leave the ocean, their normal habitat, to walk inland to their ancestral breeding grounds. There, the penguins participate in a courtship that, if successful, results in the hatching of a chick. For the chick to survive, both parents must make multiple arduous journeys between the ocean and the breeding grounds over the ensuing months.

It took one year to shoot the movie, which was filmed around the French scientific base of Dumont d'Urville in Adélie Land.

International versions
The original French language release features dialog "dubbed" as if it were spoken by the penguins themselves; the voice actors are Charles Berling, Romane Bohringer and Jules Sitruk. The Hungarian version follows that, with actors Ákos Koszegi, Anna Kubik, and Gábor Morvai.

The German version as seen in German movie theaters (and in the televised broadcast in April 2007 on channel Pro7) uses the voices of Andrea Loewig, Thorsten Michaelis and Adrian Kilian for the "dubbed dialog" of the penguins. The Austrian channel ORF 1, however, used for their near-simultaneous broadcast in April 2007 the alternate version available on the German DVD. This uses a documentary narration voiceover spoken by the German actor Sky Du Mont.

The English language release was given a more straightforward narration by American actor Morgan Freeman, as were the Dutch version (narrated by Belgian comedian Urbanus), the Indian version (narrated in Hindi and English by Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan and known by the title "Penguins: A Love Story"), the Polish version (narrated by Polish actor Marek Kondrat), and the Swedish version (narrated by Swedish actor Gösta Ekman).

The Tagalog version (also straightforward) is narrated by actress Sharon Cuneta; it was entitled Penguin, Penguin, Paano Ka Ginawa? (English: "Penguin, Penguin, How Were You Made?") with the English title as the subtitle. The Tagalog title is similar to that of a Philippine novel and movie, Bata, Bata, Paano Ka Ginawa? (English: "Child, Child, How Were You Made?")

The original version uses an original soundtrack by Émilie Simon, whereas the English language version replaces it with a score by Alex Wurman.

Subject matter
The Emperor Penguins use a particular spot as their breeding ground because it is on ice that is solid year round and there is no danger of the ice becoming too soft to support the colony. It is also in a protected area, which shields the colony from winds that can reach 300 km/h. At the beginning of Antarctic summer, the breeding ground is only a few hundred meters away from the open water where the penguins can feed. However, by the end of summer, the breeding ground is over 100 km away from the nearest open water. In order to reach it, all the penguins of breeding age must walk this great distance, occasionally sliding on their bellies.

Penguin chicks playing.The penguins are serial monogamy within each breeding season - life-long bonding would cause problems as mortality rates are high in this harsh environment. The female lays a single egg, and the co-operation of the parents is needed if the chick is to survive. After the female lays the egg, she transfers it to the feet of the waiting male with a minimal exposure to the elements, as the intense cold will kill the developing embryo. The male tends to the egg when the female returns to the sea, now even further away, both in order to feed herself and to obtain extra food for feeding her chick when she returns. She has not eaten in two months and by the time she leaves the hatching area, she will have lost a third of her body weight.

For an additional two months, the males huddle together for warmth, and incubate their eggs. They endure temperatures approaching -62 °C (-80 °F), and their only source of water is snow that falls on the breeding ground. When the chicks hatch, the males have only a small meal to feed them, and if the female does not return, they must abandon their chick and return to the sea to feed themselves. By the time they return, they have lost half their weight and have not eaten for four months. The chicks are also at risk from predatory birds such as Skuas.

The mother penguins come back and feed their young, while the male penguins go all the way back to sea (70 miles) to feed themselves. This gives the mothers time to feed their young ones and bond with them. Unfortunately, a fierce storm arrives and some of the chicks perish.

The death of a chick is tragic, but it does allow the parents to return to the sea to feed for the rest of the breeding season. When a mother penguin loses its young in a fierce storm, it sometimes attempts to steal another mother's chick. At times, the young are abandoned by one parent, and they must rely on the return of the other parent, who can recognize the chick only from its unique call. Many parents die on the trip, killed by exhaustion or by predators (such as the Leopard Seal), dooming their chicks back at the breeding ground.

The ingenious fight against starvation is a recurring theme throughout the film. In one scene, near-starving chicks are shown taking sustenance out of their father's throat-sacs, 11th-hour nourishment in the form of manguit, a milky, protein-rich substance reserved in father-penguins' throat sacs for use as a last recourse to feed their chicks in the event that circumstances require.

The parents must then tend to the chick for an additional four months, shuttling back and forth to the sea in order to provide food for their young. As spring progresses, the trip gets progressively easier, until finally the parents can leave the chicks to fend for themselves.

[edit] Releases and responses
The first screening of the film was at the Sundance Film Festival, in the USA on 21 January 2005. It was released in France the next week, on 26 January, where it earned a 4-star rating from AlloCiné, and was beaten at the box office only by The Aviator during its opening week.

The film was released on DVD in France on July 26, 2005. The DVD extras address some of the criticisms the movie had attracted, most notably by reframing the film as a scientific study and adding facts to what would otherwise have been a family movie. This Zone 2 release featured no English audio tracks or subtitles.

The original French version was released in Quebec. Subsequently, an English language version was released in the rest of North America on June 24, 2005, which drew praise from most critics who found it both informative and charming (it has received an enviable 95% "fresh" rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes, which collects movie reviews). The movie-going public apparently agreed with that assessment, as the film distinguished itself as one of the most successful films of the season on a per-theatre basis: it became the second most successful documentary released in North America, after Fahrenheit 9/11, grossing over $77 million in the United States and Canada.

The reason for the unusually strong success of March of the Penguins in the US is a subject of some speculation. Nature documentaries are released on a fairly regular basis, but most do not perform as well in the marketplace or garner as much recognition in the film industry. The decision to release this movie in theaters as opposed to television was unusual, (although not unprecedented, particularly for French documentaries such as Microcosmos and Winged Migration). Morgan Freeman's narration is partly credited with the movie's success, yet celebrity narration is a common feature of many documentaries on sources such as the Discovery Channel or the National Geographic Channel (e.g. Edward Norton hosted National Geographic's Strange Days on Planet Earth). Whatever the reasons, the movie has emotionally engaged audiences more successfully than most other such films: even before its Academy Award win its box office revenues were disproportionately high for the genre; indeed, it was more successful than any of the films nominated for Best Picture. Thanksgiving weekend, 2006, The Hallmark Channel played the film, which turned out to be Hallmark's biggest day for viewers ever.

In 2007 a direct-to-DVD parody written and produced by Bob Saget called Farce of the Penguins was released. It is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson and features other stars providing voice-overs for the penguins. Although the film uses footage from actual nature documentaries about penguins, permission was denied for using footage from March of the Penguins itself.

In November 2006, the film was adapted into a video game by DSI Games for the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance platforms. It features Lemmings-like gameplay.

In the run up to the 2007 Irish General Election Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said March of the Penguins was his favourite film of all time.

[edit] Political and social interpretations
The film attracted some political and social commentary in which the penguins were viewed anthropomorphically as having similarities with, and even lessons for, human society. Michael Medved praised the film for promoting conservative family values by showing the value of stable parenthood [2]. Medved's comments provoked responses by others, including Andrew Sullivan, who pointed out that the penguins are not in fact monogamous for more than one year. In reality they actually practice serial monogamy. Other commentators such as Matt Walker have pointed out the dark side of penguin life: many penguin 'adoptions' of chicks are in fact kidnappings, weak chicks are frequently the victims of infanticide, albino penguins are ostracised and attacked and that prostitution is practiced by at least one species of penguins.[3] Sullivan and Walker both conclude that trying to compare human behavior with animal behavior is a mistake. The director, Luc Jacquet, has condemned such comparisons between penguins and humans. Asked by the San Diego Union Tribune to comment on the film's use as "a metaphor for family values – the devotion to a mate, devotion to offspring, monogamy, self-denial", Jaquet responded

"I condemn this position. I find it intellectually dishonest to impose this viewpoint on something that's part of nature. It's amusing, but if you take the monogamy argument, from one season to the next, the divorce rate, if you will, is between 80 to 90 percent... the monogamy only lasts for the duration of one reproductive cycle. You have to let penguins be penguins and humans be humans."
Some of the controversy over this may be media driven. Rich Lowry of National Review reported that the BBC "have been harassing me for days over March of the Penguins ... about what, I'm not sure. I think to see if I would say on air that penguins are God's instruments to pull America back from the hell-fire, or something like that. As politely as I could I told her, 'Lady, they're just birds.'"

Awards
Won - Academy Award for Documentary Feature
Won - American Cinema Editors, Best Edited Documentary: Sabine Emiliani
Nominated -BAFTA Awards, Best Cinematography: Laurent Chalet, Jérôme Maison
Best Editing: Sabine Emiliani
Won - Broadcast Film Critics Association, Best Documentary
Won - César Awards, Best Sound (Meilleur son): Laurent Quaglio, Gérard Lamps
Nominated, Best Editing (Meilleur montage): Sabine Emiliani
Nominated, Best First Work (Meilleur premier film): Luc Jacquet
Nominated, Best Music Written for a Film (Meilleure musique): Émilie Simon
Won - National Board of Review, Best Documentary
Nominated - Online Film Critics Society Awards, Best Documentary
Nominated - Satellite Awards, Outstanding Documentary DVD
Nominated, Outstanding Motion Picture, Documentary
Won - Southeastern Film Critics Association Awards, Best Documentary
Nominated - Writers Guild of America, Documentary Screenplay Award: Jordan Roberts (narration written by), Luc Jacquet (screenplay/story), Michel Fessler (screenplay)
Won - Rotten Tomatoes' Golden Tomato Awards - Best Reviewed Documentary of 2005, beating Murderball and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Won - Victoires de la musique, Original cinema/television soundtrack of 2006