1. "La Marche de l'Emperor" is not a documentary. The original approach by the French filmakers was to create a poetic narrative about the march of the penguins and their child-raising not by using trained animals but with real natural shots from the Antartic. That is a complete different approach than just making another documentary, which eventually must tell you facts. A narrative doesn't have to.
2. The narrative perspective taken in the French version is the inner perspective, because the story is told from the penguins point of view. Of course, the big problem of this approach is that you have to translate the supposed penguin's emotional perspective about the world into human words, but at the same time you don't want to make them into little human beings and thus not aptly portraying their nature. But the big chance of this approach - that BTW does not always work in this film - is that - as a human being - you can get emotionally as close as possible to what happens and to get an idea of what it must be like to live under such conditions - much more, than the pure explanations of facts can do. The off-narrator puts a safe intelleuctal distance between you and the penguins. You are the superior human being in your warm latex jacket watching those little guys walking through the cold ice storm. Told, however, from a penguin's perspective, you are there with them and can experience what they are going through. If you generally refuse to believe, that there's anything like an emotion or spirit inside an animal, then of course this approach is rejected by you.
3. It's not a another babe movie. The penguin's dialogues are not there to get a story going like e.g. in "Happy Feet". They are primarily there to explain what's happening - so that you know it's the male going fishing and not the female. If this would a babe movie, then penguins would be talking all the time in every situation. But they aren't. The filmmakers tried to choose very carefully when it is apt for the penguins to talk. Plus, they use a rather poetic language - those are not dialogues really aimed at kids.
4. It's a false assumption that an off-voice narrator is more neutral. They may not humanize as much as let animals talk does, but many animal documentaries have a strong tendency to project human ideas or values on animals. When you throw adjectives such as "beautiful, fierce, impressive, cunning" on animals, you are nothing but imposing a human being's view on them.
5. I do recognize well-made art when I see it, even if it's from the US (e.g. "Gattaca" or or the "Solaris"-remake, just to name two). If "La Marche de l'Emporer" would have been done by Americans the same way as the French did it, I would have loved it just the same way. And it's us intellectual snobs here in Europe who demand that if you dub a movie, try as hard as you can to keep its original character. Or what would you think if we had put in some German Schlager or French Chanson as music score for Dirty Dancing?
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bella_furie
18 years ago
I saw the American version and thought the narration read by Morgan Freeman was quite corny. But by comparison with the English adaptation I saw of the French version, the American one is a masterpiece of restraint. "Humanizing" the birds means "de-penguinizing" them. It's an embarrassment to both human beings and penguins. The beauty and poetry of these animals in action, so well photographed, needs no gussying up. There is no added poetry in giving them poorly-imagined "voices".
There is nothing wrong with using the word "beautiful" to describe animals. Of course that is a human value. And it is one that will help preserve creatures from ecological disasters wrought by human beings. It is because we find animals beautiful, fascinating, and different from us that we appreciate and want to watch them. Turning them into ventriloquist's dummies for the most banal, kitsch meanderings of some fifth-rate writer who'd be fired from Hallmark cards is an insult to these magnificent creatures. And it's an insult to the intelligence and imagination of the audience.
This is the most spectacularly bad writing I've encountered in a film in a long while. The film was most unfairly robbed of a Razzie.
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burnumall
18 years ago
I prefer Morgan Freemans deep, somber, dignified narration to the poorly implemented voice work of the other versions.
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NewHorizons37
18 years ago
The narrative perspective taken in the French version is the inner perspective, because the story is told from the penguins point of view.
Actually, it's told from some human's imagining of the penguins' point of view. Which may be close to what the penguins would say if they could actually talk, or it may be way off base.
Seems more genuine to do the narration as done in the English version, explaining what the penguins are doing and why. The times when the English narration strayed into trying to tell us what the penguins were feeling, e.g. "the grief is unbearable" is when it went off track.
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