Arguably the finest documentary of 2005, March Of The Penguins is a fascinating, beautiful, and poignant look at the life cycle of the Emperor Penguin as it returns to its Antarctic birthplace to breed.  Documentarian Luc Jacquet and cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison spent thirteen months in the most inhospitable place on Earth to film this amazing story.  With temperatures that plunged deeper than 50 degrees below zero, and storms that pummeled the crew with winds that exceeded one hundred miles per hour, the viewer is as startled by the Penguins’ ability to survive as by the filmmakers’.

Each March, winter begins the process of freezing the Antarctic ice pack, providing a stable platform on which the Emperor Penguins court, mate, and care for their young.  By the thousands, the swimming birds immerge from the sea, catapulting their bodies onto the ice.  They’ve gorged themselves, building up a protective layer of fat to ward off frigid temperatures and the risk of starvation.  They walk, waddle, and slide a remarkable seventy miles to their mating ground.  The males and females court with gesture and vocalizations; they pair off and mate.  For the duration of this breeding season, they will be monogamous and very faithful.

It isn’t possible to build a nest, so the birds have developed a reasonably effective means to protect eggs from freezing.  After the female lays her single egg, it’s nestled on top of her feet and under a flap of skin.  Soon afterward, she passes the egg to the father, who will keep the egg warm in an identical fashion.  The females then trek back to the water to feed.  They will gorge themselves and walk back to the chicks and fathers to share their catch, regurgitating food into the anxious mouths of the hatchlings that have emerged since they left. 

By now, the male birds are close to starvation; they haven’t eaten in months.  The chicks are transferred back to the females and the males waddle off to return to the water to feed.  This cycle is repeated several times as winter passes and the Antarctic summer breaks up the ice.  By the time the chicks are mature enough to venture into the water for the first time, the seasonal disintegration of the ice has reduced the distance to the water from seventy miles to several hundred yards.  No wonder the birds trekked so far inland.

The documentary makes clear that predators as well as weather threaten the colony.  Omnivorous birds above the ice and Leopard Seals in the sea take their toll.  But the Emperor Penguin survives; there is strength in numbers.  The film is both touching and moving.  The parents’ instinctive dedication to their chicks ensures the survival of the species, but the grueling misery of the process makes for high drama.  The images are quite amazing, intimate, revealing, and breathtaking in their loveliness.  The Antarctic ice may be a forbidding place, but it has a strange and captivating beauty.  Highly compressed ice takes on a cobalt blue color I’ve only seen in Alaskan glaciers.  Fracture lines appear as complex geometric patterns.  The birds are magnificent little creatures: black and white with smart gold trim.  The almost unavoidable tendency to anthropomorphize the birds elevates the empathy factor.

Morgan Freeman narrates the film with his usual weighty gravitas.  He skillfully projects the drama of survival without histrionics.  He also book-ended War of the Worlds with voiceover in 2005.  The timbre of his voice alone seems to project credibility.