{"id":148438,"date":"2025-08-15T18:08:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T18:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/148438\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T18:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T18:08:09","slug":"march-of-the-penguins-caused-a-sensation-with-simplicity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/148438\/","title":{"rendered":"March Of The Penguins caused a sensation with simplicity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the very first feature-length documentary sensation, Robert J. Flaherty\u2019s 1922 film Nanook Of The North, made bank at the box office and inspired a slew of imitators, the line between complicated truth and easy fiction has been a blurry one. In a frozen landscape similar to the Antarctic tundra captured in March Of The Penguins, the 2005 film which would become the highest-grossing nature doc of all time, Flaherty compromised evocative footage with staged scenes and narrative distortions. The Inuit family he followed as they hunted, traded, and built shelters in the harsh Canadian Arctic\u2026wasn\u2019t a family at all<\/a>. Their actions? Outdated traditions, reenacted to better appeal to a white audience\u2019s presumptions about Indigenous peoples. In humanizing animals rather than subhumanizing people, March Of The Penguins is certainly less sinister than Nanook, but its impact on how nonfiction stories are told\u2014and the resulting sensation that its simple story stirred up\u2014continued on an established trajectory.<\/p>\n

This success was spearheaded by French director Luc Jacquet (who co-wrote the original film\u2019s voiceover) and Jordan Roberts, the screenwriter of Big Hero 6 who penned Morgan Freeman\u2019s warm-hearted narration in the English-language version. As the music swells ahead of the title screen, Freeman finishes his opening voiceover with emotionally sweeping promises: \u201cIn some ways, this is a story of survival, a tale of life over death. But it\u2019s more than that, really. This is a story about love.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hard-earned footage of emperor penguins traveling to and from their inland breeding ground, shot by cinematographers Laurent Chalet and J\u00e9r\u00f4me Maison over a year outside the Dumont d\u2019Urville Station, remains incredible\u2014especially the underwater sequences which capture the animals\u2019 aquabatic grace, bubbles painting vapor trails behind them like fighter jets. The penguins huddle together in desperate temperatures, and waddle dozens of miles for reasons beyond human understanding. But shots revealing the incredible hidden lives of birds weren\u2019t exactly novel; as former A.V. Club TV Editor Emily St. James wrote<\/a>, the French documentary Winged Migration illustrated the continent-spanning travels of these creatures two years prior. Like March Of The Penguins, Winged Migration was a hit. Unlike March Of The Penguins, though, Winged Migration lacked a central love story through-line that general audiences could latch onto.<\/p>\n

\u201cWinged Migration doesn\u2019t try to hold your hand,\u201d St. James explains. \u201cIt accepts that the impulses that drive these birds are fundamentally alien to human beings\u2014no matter how much we can understand them scientifically. Yes, the footage is amazing, but Winged Migration is basically a non-narrative art film\u2014and all the more effective for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Winged Migration earned an Oscar nomination and over $11M at the box office. March Of The Penguins won its Oscar, and made over $127M.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an incredible haul, outgrossed in the feature documentary space only by Michaels Jackson (This Is It<\/a>) and Moore (Fahrenheit 9\/11<\/a>). It also left a cultural footprint far bigger than its subjects\u2019 webbed feet. It\u2019s got name recognition, rare for any documentary, and is seemingly the only documentary to have been turned into a video game<\/a> for the Game Boy Advance. And while March Of The Penguins didn\u2019t necessarily lead to the subsequent animated penguin boom\u2014with Happy Feet<\/a>, Surf\u2019s Up<\/a>, and Madagascar<\/a> all hitting theaters over the next two years\u2014it did identify something essential that these films capitalized on: People love penguins.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bipedal, portly, flightless birds who must walk like the clumsiest humans amongst us across the harshest climate on the planet? They\u2019re prime candidates for anthropomorphized antics, which March Of The Penguins wastes no time getting into, translating their mating habits, feeding patterns, and locomotion into demystified terms that any cinemagoer could wrap their heads around. Why do the penguins do what they do? Monogamous family-oriented love, of course. Well, kind of. The frigid waters got so muddy when it came to conservative commentators\u2019 responses to the film that the director had to weigh in, calling the family values tie \u201cintellectually dishonest,\u201d and explaining<\/a> that \u201cyou have to let penguins be penguins and humans be humans.\u201d It\u2019s a good response to weirdos reading too much into your movie, but it\u2019s also a little dishonest in its own right\u2014this film became such a success, in part, because of how it told penguins\u2019 stories in human terms.<\/p>\n

It also became a success because the voice telling that story belonged to Morgan Freeman. Picking up the threads of The Shawshank Redemption, where Freeman was the audience\u2019s poignant guide through Stephen King\u2019s prison, and Bruce Almighty, where he was literally God, March Of The Penguins further weaponized the actor\u2019s omniscient syrupy tones as he turned absurd birds sliding on their bellies into epic romance. In the 20 years since, Freeman\u2019s become the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me of voiceover talent; a fact directly parodied by writer-director Bob Saget\u2019s 2007 film Farce Of The Penguins, where Samuel L. Jackson fills in as the foul-mouthed Freeman foil.<\/p>\n

Even more interesting than Farce Of The Penguins being a direct parody of a documentary (not quite as strange as a handheld video game, but still weird) is how specifically it mimics its source. Sagat\u2019s stock-footage flop is horrible\u2014a drunk shock jock\u2019s take on Walk On The Wild Side<\/a>\u2014but it also follows the plot and form of March Of The Penguins pretty closely, leaning on its audience\u2019s knowledge of that film\u2019s structure, subject matter, narrative framing, and even poetic phrasing. March guided its audience\u2019s emotional projections onto the animals, be it during beak-nuzzling love scenes or in its bleakly framed tragedies, like when a lone penguin wanders off into white oblivion or when a grieving parent prods hopelessly at its dead chick. Farce, with its story of two fratty penguin bros on a quest to get laid, at least took away that telling, rather than showing, was a key factor for mass success\u2014even during raunchy penguin sex scenes.<\/p>\n

More serious films were taking note too. Oceans, the 2010 follow-up film from the Winged Migration team that came out in a post-March world, had learned what U.S. audiences needed for documentaries to explode out of the arthouse. As St. James described, \u201cthe American version features Pierce Brosnan\u2019s voice refusing to let the once again jaw-dropping footage speak for itself\u201d\u2014footage that was shorter and more palatable than that shown to international audiences.<\/p>\n

And that watering-down that\u2019s trickled from Antarctica into the Oceans hasn\u2019t been limited to the big screen. David Attenborough\u2019s early-00s series for the BBC, The Blue Planet and The Life Of Mammals, were groundbreakingly intimate and scientifically-minded. Attenborough\u2019s post-March series Planet Earth leaned further into its narratives, making its majestic natural beauty more accessible than ever\u2014and a bigger hit than any of its predecessors. The first episode, which aired just three months after March Of The Penguins finally left theaters, followed emperor penguins as they weather the winter and nurture their new chicks.<\/p>\n

March Of The Penguins only needed 86 minutes to make its audiences relate to some of the strangest critters in the most remote corner of our planet. It even caps its story with one final, endearing comparison: A montage plays over the credits of its death-defying crew slip-sliding around the ice in a graceless march of their own, dragging their cameras and tripods across snow drifts right alongside the birds they\u2019re intending to film. It\u2019s in these silent moments, captured with candid humor and hands-off style, that the connection between audience, subject, and filmmakers is most elemental\u2014no love story required.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since the very first feature-length documentary sensation, Robert J. Flaherty\u2019s 1922 film Nanook Of The North, made bank…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":148439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-148438","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}