Arctic Tale
Directors: Adam Ravetch, Sarah Robinson
Cast: Queen Latifah, little kiddies and animals
Paramount Home Video
2007

Let it be known to the people who just scroll down to the bottom of the review JUST to see what my score was for this movie that I never gave this movie a score. If you watched March of the Penguins, you will know how hard it is to say how a documentary like that is as far as quality goes. (And no, calling it cute doesn’t qualify how good it is. You can call one of the girls at the mall cute, but she might have a history of Chlamydia that you don’t know about.)

That is why Arctic Tale isn’t receiving a rating from me. It won’t get my opinion, because I’ll just be calling it cute. I won’t compare it to March of the Penguins, because they are two different movies and Arctic Tale never received as much buzz, therefore they won’t make animated movie after animated movie of polar bears and walruses. I won’t even be criticizing Queen Latifah‘s narration, which says a whole lot about me.

I’m only here to explain that Arctic Tale just adds on to the many movies about global warming and saving our wildlife.

In this post-An Inconvenient Truth world that we are living in, it seems clear to everyone that global warming is real, so they are pretty much all trying to remind us about it. Other documentaries and a piece of crap movie called Evan Almighty tried that on us, but they never got as far as Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning documentary. Even though those movies never really tried to prove it to us, they just said “Global warming is real. Go do something about it.”

Arctic Tale went the extra step that Evan Almighty and documentaries on the subject like The 11th Hour were too lazy to take. Instead of Mr. Mackey playing the part saying “Global warming is bad, mmkay,” they get the animals into their environment to act it out for us. At the end of this movie, little kids who know more about the subject than most scientists explain to us how we can save our world. It’s pretty bad that these kids are telling us while grown adults like Evan Almighty director Tom Shadyac would rather throw politics and religion into the big pot of crap.

This documentary is 100% NOT-POLITICAL. I would be surprised that Queen Latifah could even muster a decent rap, let alone know a thing about politics. We’re watching these polar bears and walruses growing up into their environment. As they grow up, the ice in the Arctic starts to melt, and it becomes harder for them to eat and survive. Not only that, the other animals are getting hungry around them, which causes them to kill these poor animals that we are following in order for themselves to survive.

The footage shown in this documentary is composed of eight hundred hours of footage that married filmmakers Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robinson filmed within the span of fifteen years, meaning that this was in the making WAY longer than March of the Penguins. It’s not a scripted movie, either. We follow two different families, one being a family of polar bears and the other being a family of walruses. These families never meet up throughout the film, making it more effective. Being that they never meet up with each other, we watch two different families on two different sides of the Arctic that are dealing with the ice melting and the temperature changing.

It’s better when the animals tell us the story rather than the adults because the animals are the ones that are living through it. Al Gore’s never been to the Arctic or anywhere else where it’s already being affected, but these animals have been there since the beginning of their lives, coming out of their mothers. Given the circumstances, the animals are the one that are telling us to save them right now.

At the end of the movie, footnotes say that if we don’t do something about the temperatures, all Arctic ice will be melted by 2040. Let’s get a plan working here, because if it’s already affecting these poor Arctic animals, it’s only around the block from us.