Thursday 3 February 2005

documanthropomorphism

I headed out to Mega-CGR the other day with Jacques and Sophie to see La Marche de L'Empereur, a documentary film about emperor penguins.

What a load of tripe. The film was off to a bad start with the appalling music they chose, but it all went to hell the moment the first penguin started speaking. When the second got chatty, I groaned, but it all went totally to shit when they popped a sprog and he started rabbitting on. Now, anthropomorphism (it's a big word, but I'm not afraid to use it) in nature documentary films is surely nothing new, but usually directors are content to use suggestion and analogy. As for the impartial eye of the camera, it obviously was absent the day they decided that the leopard seal hunting the penguins was a horror-movie villain, but that the penguins, themselves hunting fish, were benign.

David Attenborough wept.

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