Take a bow, Mother Nature.
To help mark Earth Day, Disneynature introduces a brilliant documentary that's all about this planet of ours.
Earth is an eye-popping celebration of flora and fauna all over the globe, a film that starts in the Arctic and touches down in deserts, oceans, mountains and rainforests.
The extraordinary visual display that is Earth follows three animal families as they face various challenges.
The first scenes in the movie focus on polar bears, both playful cubs and hungry adults coping with changes in their environment. Later, a group of elephants begins a lengthy trek to find food and water, and after that, a mother and a baby whale set out on their amazing migration.
Besides following the animal families, Earth looks at plants and animals in every climate zone -- and does so with all the technical magic available.
You can see extreme close-ups, in slow motion, of baby birds leaping out of the nest; or aerial shots of a caribou migration that reveals the enormity of the herd; or elapsed time photographs of the woodlands that move the trees from leaf buds to fall colours in a second.
The movie will show you the mating display of Birds of Paradise in the rain forests of New Guinea or impossibly large schools of fish in the ocean, and presents such wonders of the natural world in a way that makes you feel as if you're right there. (Expect vertigo in the sequence that shows Demoiselle Cranes flying through violent winds to cross the Himalayas.)
The movie is every bit as busy, vivid and colourful as the natural phenomena it examines.
Earth was five years in the making, three of those years spent filming unusual creatures in hard-to-reach habitats. The movie was shot simultaneously with the Emmy Award winning BBC TV show, Planet Earth.
It's the first in a series of nature documentaries that will be released from Disneynature, a new branch of the Disney company, and fans can look forward to upcoming documentaries about flamingoes, orangutans and the world's oceans.
Quibblers will quibble that the movie is awash in human emotion and waxes anthropomorphic all over the place; furthermore, the camera looks away from the darker side of nature -- all that prey and death stuff -- to maintain a child-friendly surface.
Those interested in every detail may be disappointed in the way reality has been edited; on the other hand, the squeamish and those accompanying children to the movie may be relieved that the more violent side of nature isn't dwelled upon.
You know who you are.
Otherwise, Earth is a real crowd pleaser that manages to be the perfect combination of entertainment and education.
Earth is narrated by James Earl Jones.
(This film is rated G)
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