The emperor of ice

La marche de l'empereur (March of the penguins)

(2005)

So here was my thinking when I considered this for Friday night deaccession: if I so loved this when it was new that I felt compelled to buy the DVD, but that DVD was still in its shrinkwrap 6 years after I bought it, how badly do I really need to own it? Why not watch it again, then offer it first to my granddaughter, then, if there's already a copy in her house, put it up for grabs?

Well, I am still going to offer it to Veronica, but if she doesn't take it, I'm going to keep it for a while longer. It really is an amazing story, remarkably filmed, with the cutest damn chicks in the ornithological world, and if the narrative is a tad heavy on anthropomorphization, at least it's nonscientific in the voice of God and Nelson Mandela. (I actually checked the English subtitles, hoping that they would perhaps be based on the original French soundtrack, but no: they were just the same words Freeman was reading. In fact, the French subtitles also matched Freeman's narration, so maybe the French were equally anthropomorphic, and the English narrative is an accurate translation. Seems as if I read differently sometime, but I might be thinking of another film.)