“March of the Penguins” proves the axiom about survival of the fittest.
And cutest, too.
The emperor penguins featured in this documentary, which opens July 8 in Denver, have developed the most arduous and complicated mating process in the animal kingdom. It is captured in this film. They are also adorable as they undertake their task.
Although birds, penguins can’t fly. But they are strong and graceful swimmers and deep-sea divers. They live in Antarctica yet are warm-blooded and able to regulate their body temperature.
“In the water, this creature is magnificent. It can go to great depth, totally swift, with incredible mobility,” says Luc Jacquet, the French director of “March.” (Although a French production, the film has English-language narration by Morgan Freeman.) “But then at a certain point, they are forced to get out of the water and walk on ice in funny feet and can only make a small distance at any time.
“It’s almost like a Greek tragedy, where they have this gift of water and at some point God said, ‘You screwed up, so you have to walk on land now with these funny feet.”‘
Though he speaks some English, Jacquet uses a translator for this interview. It is at his publicist’s office in a building with a view overlooking Los Angeles on a warm, sunny and most un-penguinlike day. He is good-
humored – especially about penguins, which he warns are too troublesome to make good pets.
In winter, when the weather is at its fiercest, the birds move from sea to land and march to a remote mating ground. It is protected (by Antarctic standards) from the icy sea and the worst of the howling winds. There, in a nine-month ritual of baffling complexity, they reproduce.
Because penguins aren’t good walkers, they waddle upright across snow and ice single file, occasionally belly-flopping and sliding to rest their web feet. From a distance, it looks lovable – toddlers stumbling around a very expansive backyard. Their black-and-white coloration is reminiscent of a tuxedo.
Yet they walk that way to try to stay alive. “If they’re marching single file and somebody falls into a crevasse, the rest are going to be saved because they’ll see that,” Jacquet says.
Coupling occurs with the roly-poly grace of dancing bowling pins. Next, the females lay eggs and then delicately pass them by foot to their male mates. Exhausted and hungry, the females then march off to sea to find and store up food.
The males incubate the eggs for months atop their feet until they hatch. One wrong step and the egg can fall, roll away and break. To conserve warmth at minus 70 degrees, the egg-harboring males form huge huddles. They take turns moving from the center to the outskirts.
“This particular species has one choice only: to have solidarity, to trust one another and count on one another,” Jacquet says. Otherwise, “they wouldn’t have fuel to last all winter.”
The females return for the feeding of the hatched newborn. (The couples recognize each other by mentally “recording” their cries and singing.) Eventually the starving males march off to sea for food and come back. It’s a process that doesn’t end until the newborns are old enough to make it to the sea and swim off on their own.
Jacquet, 37, who grew up in the snowy mountains of eastern France and studied biology, spent 10 years visiting Antarctica before deciding to make “March.” He earlier had spent 14 months at the French scientific center Dumont d’Urville, near a colony of emperor penguins. There he could observe their habits up close. “I was ready to tell their story because I had lived their story,” he says.
For the film, he supervised cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison, who spent 13 months following the penguins. Experienced divers went underwater to film the penguins as they searched for small fish, plankton and algae.
The filmmakers had to learn to come as close as possible without being intrusive. “If you’re going to get too close and they’re under stress, then you’ll get stressed-out animals, which we didn’t want,” Jacquet says.
A mistake could be disastrous, causing the males to drop the fragile eggs and kill the unhatched penguins. Penguin reproduction being what it is, some losses occurred anyway. The crew avoided intervening to save the eggs or the chicks.
“The practical side is if you try to save an egg that rolled out by putting it back between their feet, you’d put them into such a state of panic that they would not understand it.
“The ethical side is you have to be neutral and be respectful of their life. They have survived for thousands of years.”
