Love & A Cold Climate
When a shot of a towering glacier, gleaming and impossibly alabaster, opens March of the Penguins, one senses that the story about to unfold is an epic one.
On the South Pole, it's 58 below in daylight on a good day. But millions of years ago, intones the narrator (Morgan Freeman), Antarctica was a tropical place, and our hero, the emperor penguin, enjoyed a warm clime and lush vegetation. As the continent slowly drifted south, everyone and everything fled or died off. Except for the penguins. And for the past several thousand generations, penguins aged five and up have made a 70-mile trek once yearly to ensure their kind's continuance.
It's an unparalleled nine-month odyssey tinged with fairytale struggle: death-defying journeys; grasping for love, however ephemeral; against-all-odds protection of new life from the fiercest of foes.
Leopard seals, their principal predator and the only species of seal to feed on other seals, love penguin meat above all else. Eel-faced, torpedo-shaped beasties, they skin their penguin prey not with their inward-curving, razor teeth talons, but by shaking their flesh off. Can you say "antagonist"? But that unpleasantness is just one of many obstacles faced by the emperor penguin. Climate, geography and starvation are its principal opponents.
The adventure starts in March, when the Antarctic summer winds down into fall. From all over the continent, clans of emperor penguins start walking. From afar, they resemble packs of trenchcoated, obese humans in an awkward but determined waddle-plod. Up close, the creatures are a feat of evolutionary esthetics: Part deco, part mod, their beauty astonishes.
Male emperor penguins are the primary caretakers of the egg. Going without food for well over 100 days, they balance their unborn progeny atop talons, tucked beneath their dense bellies, while huddled with the mass of penguin dads, all trying to keep warm. During this time the famished mothers head back to the sea to feed and gather food for their young.
One storm can dash a family's shot at procreation. After 100-mile-an-hour-wind blizzards, eggs loll about, lifeless, having been knocked from fathers' delicate grasps; they can survive mere seconds in the fearsome cold. If a leopard seal picks off a mother as she feeds, that too spells certain death for the young.
It's impossible to avoid ascribing emotion to these sleek, otherworldly animals. The affection between couples is unbelievably tender; their dewy gazing could fell a polar bear at 50 feet. And though these emperor penguins do succeed, generation after generation, in reproducing, the odds are glacial in size. In this story-expertly shot, edited and narrated-so much can, and does, go wrong.