I try to catch these DisneyNature documentaries in the theater, but I missed this one and it still plays pretty well on the big screen at home. This one has some great images which isn’t a surprise for DisneyNature, but it doesn’t succeed as well as some of the others have in the past. This one, more so than some of the others in recent memory, leans into the childishness of the movie; that’s a problem exactly since it is a movie aimed at kids, but rather than just doing some anthropomorphizing, as they always do, this one goes whole hog by having Ed Helms narrate and basically give voice to the main penguin character, Steve. I’ll admit some of the jokes worked, especially in a clever sequence under the end credits, but it was often sillier than I like. Also, maybe we’ve just kind of reached penguin documentary saturation level. Penguins of Madagascar had a joke about how people are constantly making documentaries about penguins, you know; that’s probably a red flag as far as making more. That said, I still enjoyed the movie, even if it fell short of DisneyNature’s best work (Monkey Kingdom & Born in China, should you wonder). There’s a couple of scenes involving leopard seals, the main predators in the world of this particularly small type of penguin, that are really suspenseful and even genuinely frightening. Anyway, it’s a brisk ninety minutes or so, the image quality is wonderful and I’ve always kind of viewed these as kid-friendly gateways to the world of David Attenborough and other more serious nature documentary filmmakers. This movie might just get some kids to sit down and watch an actual DOCUMENTARY about the wonders of nature; if that means I have to put up with a couple of annoying pop-song montages and some corny jokes, well, that’s a price I think I’m willing to pay so that a future generation can hopefully develop a love for nature films and for nature itself. 3 stars.
tl;dr – DisneyNature doc treads very familiar ground & is even sillier than usual; but it boasts, as usual, stunningly beautiful imagery &, if it gets kids to watch a nature doc, I’m all for it. 3 stars.