Earth

[April 22nd, 2009]

If there was one thing Walt Disney Pictures used to do well, it was nature movies. Actually, if there was one thing Disney used to do well, it was cartoons about talking fawns who must find inner strength after the death of their mothers. But if there were two things Disney used to do well, the second thing was nature movies. They were called True-Life Adventures; titles like Seal Island and Beaver Valley took home short-film Oscars throughout the 1950s. If they also shamelessly anthropomorphized those seals and beavers—and enlisted the voice of Mickey Mouse to add approximations of their mating cries when audio was not available—such was the price of storytelling that would draw families to the majesty of wilderness.

In this century, Disney no longer has a chokehold on fuzzy animals, animated or otherwise—the company has to negotiate with outside experts. Pixar provides the cartoons, and now Disney has contracted with the BBC to pare down its jaw-dropping documentary series Planet Earth for the big screen. (The TV series is available on DVD and the Discovery Channel, and I am reliably informed that it is without peer as nocturnal viewing material for the stoned.) The adaptation, its title now shortened to the ambitiously catholic Earth, marks the launch of Disney’s eco-friendly label Disneynature, and it is hard not to suspect that its three central narratives—following polar bears, African elephants and humpback whales—were selected for maximum mother-child reunions and plush-toy revenues. Still, the footage is spectacular: A great white shark leaping to chomp a seal curls a fin in midair, as if taking a bow; the night-vision sight of a dozen lions trying to take down a full-grown pachyderm is worth the price of a ticket.

Or it would be, if not for Disney’s intrusions. Earth is narrated by James Earl Jones in chummy Burl Ives mode, and he is incessantly interrupting the mortal struggles of the beasts to instruct us, absurdly, whom to root for. The futile attempt of a famished polar bear paterfamilias to hunt—he’s seeking the one walrus vulnerable enough to become the meal he needs to survive—is riveting, until Jones begins referring to him as “the cub’s father,” as if the old man went out for milk and walrus and never came home. “Their father’s brave spirit will live on in their young hearts,” Jones concludes, and it’s certainly true that the spirit of something is enduring, though I suspect it may be True-Life Adventures. Oh, drat: Man is in the forest. G.