NARRATED BY QUEEN LATIFAH

Genre: Documentary
Director: Adam Ravetch, Sarah Robertson
RunTime: 1 hr 48 mins
Released By: GV and Festive Films
Rating: PG
Official Website: http://www.arctictalemovie.com/

Opening Day: 13 September 2007

Synopsis:

From National Geographic Films, the people who brought you MARCH OF THE PENGUINS and Paramount Classics, the studio that brought you AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, ARCTIC TALE is an epic adventure that explores the vast world of the Great North.

In the frozen wilderness of the Arctic, each year an ancient cycle begins: a cycle of birth, death and rebirth, love and life, self-sacrifice and great danger. Two giants of the icy North Pole – Seela, the walrus and Nanu, the polar bear - start their magical journey, from birth to adolescence to maturity and parenthood in the frozen Arctic wilderness. They are playful, mischievous, daring, calf and cub romp freely, eager for adventure, but nonetheless, both are extremely vulnerable.

Their mothers will stop at nothing in the battle to rear and protect their young. Freezing cold; starvation-level hunger; lethal threats from predators and the monumental, snowbound landscape itself - all are confronted and defeated in the spectacular life-or-death struggle for survival.

Movie Review:

Not so much an informative documentary and not so much a charming composite of family-friendly embellishment, “Arctic Tale” finds itself right smack in the middle of self-consciously catering to both the apolitical and political. If the film’s eventual silence over the specific polemic is anything to go by, then it should be added that it makes a diffidently rhetorical and not all too searching point about global-warming’s dire effects on the polar icecaps and its denizens for the sake of a barely tenable story.

It all just amounts to a somewhat ironic escalation of furball fiction by supplanting the increasingly sophisticated and life-like rendering of underwritten, anthropomorphic critters and photo-realistic graphics with actual animals and environment. And not for nothing but the whimsical “Babe” and the disarmingly sincere “Two Brothers” have never idealised themselves after documentaries or the austere notions of non-fiction. “Arctic Tale” is remarkably well shot, at times even wondrous in its visual execution, which should be no surprise considering that it is ostensibly a National Geographic production with all the vigour and dedication that usually goes along with that tag.

But if “Arctic Tale” templates the “narrative” of its obvious sire in Luc Jacquet’s “March of the Penguins” and its grounded fancies of quaint animal behaviour, then the filmmaking coupling of Sarah Robertson and Adam Ravetch facetiously infuse their film with largely trivialising kiddie-fodder pop sensibilities in an attempt to ingratiate itself to its audience. The insufferable scripting of its narration aside, it doesn’t quite nail its fascination with the circle of life but instead uses it as a cheap opportunity to aggrandise the basic communal bonds between the animals with banal show tunes

Naming its two primary subjects, while not impractical further adds to the overly accentuated (and patronising) humanisation of the animal kingdom. Seela, the walrus and Nanu, the polar bear were purported to have been followed through adolescence and maturity but the film is unconcerned about following the same walrus and bear around despite predicating its entire approach on personalising these fuzz-balls. The air of disingenuousness markedly hits home when the film winds down with a falsely optimistic Kumbaya vibe that casts doubts of whether the film fully reflects what the filmmakers set out to investigate over 10 years ago.

Movie Rating:

(Amiable in disposition but not necessary interesting or beneficial)

Review by Justin Deimen