Earth is the official kick-off of Disney’s newest film label, Disneynature. As a studio, Disney has a grand tradition in the genre of nature documentaries from its library of 12 True-Life Adventures made between 1948 and 1960. If you see Earth in the theater, you’ll probably see a trailer for the next year’s release, Oceans, which plays heavily on that nostalgia.
Nature documentaries are slow in the making though, so when the new film division was announced last year, it could have been years before the first original title would be available. So rather than wait, Disneynature is instead debuting with the U.S. release of Earth. Earth is actually a 2007 release, having already played throughout Europe and Asia. So for once, we Americans (both North and South) are behind the curve on a movie release.
Unfortunately, this big gap between then and now means that for a lot of viewers there is going to be a strong sense of deja vú with some of the footage shown. Originally produced by the BBC as a companion film to the much lengthier television documentary Planet Earth, a lot of footage in the movie is recycled from the TV series. We may just now be getting the movie, but Planet Earth has been a staple on the Discovery Channel for quite a while now. It has also been used to demonstrate the “wow factor” of high-definition television in many of the places where you find TV sets being sold. If you’ve seen those already, then except for getting the large screen experience, it almost certainly won’t be worth the money to watch pieces of it again.
The organizing structure for Earth is that it starts near the North Pole as spring breaks and then slowly heads south to Antarctica, stopping frequently along the way to look at how nature responds to the complete cycle of seasons. There will be a couple dozen such stops over the course of the movie, some only a minute or two long. While most of these segments are awe-inspiring in one way or another, such a format does not lend itself to creating a sense of narrative flow.
Working to counteract that disjointedness are the narrative voiceover of James Earl Jones, and repeated returns to three particular scenes: A family of polar bears dealing with the challenges of a changing Arctic climate; a herd of elephants crossing a desert of dust to get to a their wet season watering hole; and a mother-child humpback whale pair making the long migration from the Tropics down to Antarctica, where the food is.
These inclusions do help, but its simply not enough to avoid some restlessness as we’re quickly moved from cranes migrating over the Himalayas, to a leopard hunting some antelope-type thing, to time-lapse photography of lichen growing (note: not an actual sequence, though each is in the movie). That last one highlights another pacing problem for the movie—it is absolutely in love with fancy new super slow motion and time-lapse photography. It must be said that the results are phenomenal, especially what appears to be time-lapse phography done using aerial moving cameras. With that caveat noted, though, once one shot of a great white shark leaping completely out of the water has been slowed to a 45 super slow motion second sequence, it isn’t really necessary to immediately follow up with another jump slowed even more (or maybe it just seemed that way).
Using the “antsy children” metric to determine how engaging a movie is, Earth rates poorly. Throughout the screening, young children were constantly chattering (and not so much about the movie) or actually breaking loose to roam around.
If your kids don’t have a healthy attention span, it would probably be better to find the Planet Earth DVDs and watch them at home. You probably don’t need to worry about the “violence,” though unless your child is particularly sensitive. While the movie does not shy away from acknowledging that nature is red in tooth and claw, very little of the red is actually shown on screen. Whenever a predator obtains its prey, the camera shyly looks away.
All in all, it is really difficult to recommend putting out $10 to catch this in the theater, even with Disney’s offer to plant a tree for every person who sees it in the first week. It turns out that nature from all over Earth is just too large a subject to cover both coherently and comprehensively, but if you have a good home theater setup you’ll definitely want to consider it when it is out on DVD (and if you have a region free player you don’t even have to wait if you buy the European version, though you’ll get Patrick Stewart narrating rather than James Earl Jones).
I still look forward, however, to the future releases under the Disneynature banner, most of which are of much narrower focus (flamingos, chimpanzees, and big cats are all scheduled for their time in the limelight). Earth just has too much focus on “ooh, pretty” and not enough on a narrative or education.
Earth is a Disneynature presentation
- Wide release on Wednesday, April 22 (Earth Day).
- Directed by Alistair Fothergill and Mark Linfield
- Written by Alistair Fothergill, Mark Linfield, Leslie Megahey
- Narrated by James Earl Jones
- Rated G
- Running time 90 minutes
- Alex’s Rating: 6 out of 10
