The nature documentary has long been a staple of the small screen, whether its NHK or the BBC, but in recent years more and more have been showing up in the cinemas.
Massive image size may be one attraction, but most recent hits have also had a very clever angle: "Le peuple migrateur" focused strictly on bird migration routes across the planet; "La marche de l'empereur" found an emotional connection, stories of love and family, among Emperor penguins in the remotest regions of Antarctica.
The latest addition to the big-screen genre is simply titled "Earth," a feature film edited down from the BBC TV series "Planet Earth" by British directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield. This film comes with a lot of hype: more than 4,500 days of shooting in 200 locations on super-slow-motion cameras that record 2,000 frames per second, and a budget in the $40 million range, unheard of for documentaries.
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