Rating: G
Genre: Nature [nf]
Release Date: 03/27/2007
SubTitles: English/Espanol
Dubbed: English/Espanol
Distributor/Studio: Warner Home Video

While many people think of penguins as comical birds who look like they've been decked out in tuxedos, the truth is they're among the strongest and most resilient creatures in the animal kingdom. And they have to be -- each year, the emperor penguins of Antarctica travel through the most punishing environment on Earth to their nesting grounds, and after the females lay their eggs, the males keep them warm while their mates walk 70 miles back to the sea to fatten themselves with fish for themselves and their young. Filmmaker Luc Jacquet spent over a year braving the frigid temperatures of the South Pole to film this annual ritual of the penguins, and March of the Penguins documents their brave struggle to survive, as well as the close emotional bonds between the penguin families. March of the Penguins was first screened in France as La Marche de l'Empereur, with a handful of French actors providing a voice-over in which they expressed the "thoughts" of the penguins; for the American edition, Morgan Freeman was brought in to deliver a more straightforward narration.

~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Harnessing the drama of ten Oscar nominees in the simple act of mated penguins transferring an egg across frigid ice, March of the Penguins became a documentary phenomenon, grossing upwards of 70 million dollars and thriving in theaters for months on the strength of its word of mouth. But the most phenomenal detail is that March is not that different from something you might stumble across on Animal Planet, except for being narrated by Morgan Freeman. What March of the Penguins revealed was a true audience appetite for low-tech real-world nourishment, and for a film that would please children without resorting to garish animated fads and their product tie-ins. From the moment the penguins' bobbing heads first peek over the horizon, it's clear the audience will be brought into touch with both the familiar and the unknown; familiar because everyone knows and loves penguins in the abstract, but unknown because few have a sense of the arduous life cycle these determined creatures endure. In their own amazing feat of endurance, Luc Jacquet's crew has captured a palpable sense of both the macroscopic and microscopic struggles of the emperor penguin's mating ritual, documenting the cold and snowy hours in which the birds cling to their basic survival impulse. The harsh conditions also have the effect of putting into perspective the problems of a movie patron sitting in an air-conditioned theater. Laurent Chalet's beautiful camerawork of the Antarctic landscape demands to be seen on the big screen, but even at home on DVD, March of the Penguins is something far more profound than your average nature film.

~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide

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