Word: earthed
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Produced by Disney's new film unit Disneynature, Earth marks the company's grand re-entry to the big-screen nature doc arena - which, as today's children are too young to recall, Disney re-invented in the 1950s with its True Life Adventures wildlife series, including six feature films and seven shorts. Before Disney, animals were often depicted on film as targets, either for collectors or, more often, for hunters. True Life Adventures went the opposite direction, anthropomorphizing wildlife and elevating their life experience to dramatic effect. (Would the creator of Mickey Mouse be expected to do anything else...
...case of Disneynature's first big-screen venture, it is largely that: a transplant and blow-up of a TV documentary to the big screen. In Earth, filmmakers Mark Linfield and Alastair Fothergill capture a caravan of elephants crossing the brutal Kalahari Desert, along with a pride of hungry lions, and the rainbow of natural marvels contained in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. The narrative theme is the sun, the source of life and the bringer of seasons, from one pole to the other. The film is narrated by James Earl Jones...
...footage seems familiar, it's probably because you've already seen it for free on television, in the BBC miniseries Planet Earth (repackaged also by the Discovery Channel in the U.S.). Earth was shot alongside Planet Earth, using many of the same crew, in part to cut costs. At least half of what is contained in the Disney film has already been released on the BBC, Discovery Channel and DVDs...
...that doesn't dissuade the makers of Earth. "This is cinema," says Linfield. "These are the images we knew would work well on the big screen...
Despite the intense nature of some of the footage, Disneynature has cleaned up the material for young children - no actual killing is shown on film - and Earth is rated G. For a nature film, Earth also takes a notably G-rated stance on the subject of the environment. Climate change is mentioned a few times in passing - and we see a male polar bear in northern Norway struggling with melting sea ice - but there is no real message or explanation of it here. Instead of doom, the overall mood is joy, the renewal that comes with rain...