Winged Migration Feature film directed by Jacques Perrin, 89 minutes, Sony Pictures, selected cinemas Reviewed by Barry Fox
FIVE crews – 450 people – spent four years filming birds on the wing in 40 countries, mainly using cameras mounted on remote-controlled aircraft that flew with the birds. On the ground, hidden cameras and long lenses caught the humour of grebes walking on water and cranes slipping on the ice.
With action movies now so heavily reliant on digital cinema effects, we no longer expect to believe what we see on screen. So the main titles for Winged Migration promise that no special effects were used. But some shots – of ducks sludging through east European pollution and caged birds looking wistfully at free flyers overhead – look staged. So too, do the sequences seen from satellite heights.
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Some viewers will wish for less music and more hard fact in the sparse narrative. Others will wonder what a feature-length documentary is doing in their local cinema. But Walt Disney did it 50 years ago with The Living Desert, and in many respects Perrin out-Disneys Disney.