This is like the best of a Discovery Channel documentary blended together with a children’s fairy tale version of a love story. Talk about anthropomorphism at its most wonderful!

Unlike most animals who mate in the spring and raise their babies in the summer, Emperor penguins do it backwards. They mate and give birth under the most extreme of climates in the brutally harsh winter and French research team called The Institut Polaire Français decided to capture the whole thing on film.

In the U.S. release, the rich voice of Morgan Freeman narrates the story of the Emperor penguins who have a fascinating way of picking a mate, being seasonally monogamous, and communally driven to protect themselves and their newborns from the cold harsh elements.

You can’t help but laugh at the straightly told story of thousands of penguins milling around looking for that “perfect someone” to be their mate at the beginning of the season. The voice-over tells a story of love that seems incredibly heavy handed except that the camera captures what looks remarkably like “cuddling” between these sometimes awkward and comical birds.

Suspense actually builds gracefully out of the drama that unfolds between each couple’s effort protect their egg, feed themselves and later their chick. The male penguins play an equal role in the nurturing and feeding (which may make some human husbands find themselves more henpecked by their wives) through an extraordinary amount of physical self sacrifice.

Whether you like animal documentaries or not, you’ll be riveted to the images of penguins waddling, huddling, fawning over each other and shots of them marching through the harsh landscape with such purpose. The scenery is gorgeous with the black penguins starkly contrasting against the bleak, white landscape. Since the daylight during the winter is barely existent, I couldn’t help but wonder how the light always manages to be so beautiful and illuminating. I actually thought that some of the most fascinating scenes from the movie were shown during the ending credits when you can see the researchers interacting with the penguins. I hope that we get to see more of that on the DVD release, since I’m terribly curious to know how it was all done.

Overall, this is a documentary that is commendable for the achievement it took to film under such harsh circumstances, but it also flows wonderfully as a simplistic and touching story. I was amazed at how moved I was by the penguins. It’s a truly satisfying must-see for the summer.

***As a side bar, I read that the French version does not have a Morgan Freeman-like narrator telling the story from the human perspective, but the story is told through the perspective of the penguin. I really can’t imagine how that works! I would love to see it since it sounds like a whole other movie entirely!

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