A salutary lesson

I took our seven year old son to see the Disney movie Earth today. I confess the prevailing emotion going into the theater was dread. Dread that this would be yet another saccharine ‘animals behaving like people’ horror so beloved of the Disney studio, replete with overt cuteness and with a mile thick sugar coating to protect all and sundry from the brutal survival that is the natural world of wild animals.

A still from ‘Earth’

Mercifully, the movie is made by the BBC, which still shows vestiges of taste now and then, and we both enjoyed it. Winston, my son, loved it because of the photography, the great pictures of animals and the short length. I enjoyed it because of the photography, orchestral music well played by the Berlin Philharmonic (though doubtless Herbert von Karajan is spinning in his grave at the prospect of his orchestra playing movie music) and punches-only-lightly-pulled when something eats something else. The gore is edited out but you get the message. Mother Nature is anything but nice, polar bears are dumb as two bricks and survival goes to the fittest. (Like Wall Street – just substitute ‘bankers’ for ‘polar bears’).

However, the broader lessons learned from something like this are that working with animals may be as frustrating as working with actors, but they don’t sue and their appearance fees are low. Further, the reality dawns that the amateur photographer – be he movie or still – really is wasting his time trying to improve on the polished professional work on display here. Clearly the work involved was enormous, requiring hundreds of people and a huge ratio of scrap to gold, and dictating the use of ultralight aircraft, balloons, diving equipment, and so on. And lots and lots of takes, considerable risk to life and limb and a cornucopia of top class gear.

Judging by the clearly visible dirt in many frames the whole thing was made on film, rather than digital; we were viewing it on a large (I would guess 250″ plus) screen and the detail definition was startlingly good. Which brings us to two final lessons. There is no way on earth that you are going to be able to reproduce the impact of such a movie at home. And that narrator James Earl Jones has the best voice franchise in the US, if not the best voice. That belonged to James Mason, but he left us a while back.