We saw March of the Penguins last night at the Michigan Theater. Despite my misgivings (and the poor quality of the print and sound), it was a marvelous film.

At dinner beforehand, one esteemed literary friend grimaced slightly when I mentioned we were going to see the film, and opined that “it would be a great 30 minute special on the Discovery channel, but two hours is a lot of penguins”. Even with the gravitas of a Morgan Freeman voiceover, I wasn’t sure if a film documenting the lives of a bunch of waddling birds on the ice would be compelling. It is definitely compelling, and the narrative that Freeman voices provides enough of a hook to keep the film from being too abstract.

What I found interesting was the audience’s reactions to the story. There was a lot of laughter at the predictably “cute” moments in the film, and tears at the very sad, which seems to hang on the intentional and heavy amount of anthropomorphizing of the birds. The main thrust of the story is the extraordinary lengths that these animals must go through in order to mate and raise young. Each half of the breeding pair will spend many weeks without food, the males having to protect the egg during the harshest months of the Antarctic winter while the female feeds and later returns to feed the now-hatched chick. So when one mother’s chick dies of exposure, the narrator tells us “the loss is unbearable”, and indeed we hear the female bird cry in a lost, forlorn sort of way. Or was it a “lost, forlorn” cry? I don’t want to argue whether or not animals have feelings — they certainly seem that they do, but I find it dangerous to rely completely on interpreting the rest of creation entirely through the lens of human emotion. It either leads to arrogance (they don’t have feelings, so why does it matter), or silly, stupid sentimentality (oh, those bears are so cute! RAWR!….I don’t feel so good).

Regardless, this film is worth the hype. You’ll be glad to step out into the humid, August air after having watched these poor male birds stand about in -100F weather while protecting a single egg with their feet.