Niki Caro, Director. Whale Rider . New Zealand/Germany, 2002).
Jacques Perrin, Director. Winged Migration.
France/Germany/Spain/Italy/Switzerland, 2001).

This is the first review for a new section in Society & Animals on animals and film. I intend in the forthcoming issues not only to review current films but also to look at different genres of animal films past and present, the work of specific directors, as well as use interview material from those involved in different aspects of animal filmmaking. This will include not only filmmakers and camerapersons but also people involved in animal welfare and animal training. For this first review, however, I am going to discuss two works that were the most noteworthy examples of films with animal themes at this summer’s Cambridge Film Festival. The first of these, Whale Rider, contains ideas familiar to family films involving animal motifs: It is a rite of passage movie that also involves loss. In that sense, it conforms to a pattern, common to such films, of fragmented families and communities that I discuss in my book, Animals in Film. In fact, Whale Rider echoes, though this may not be a flattering comparison, similar notions to another set of films about whales: the Free Willy series.

The second film, Winged Migration, is, on the surface, a very different type of film. It is a poetic portrait of global bird migrations and breeding colonies. Although it might be classed as a nature documentary it is, in many respects, an unusual one. Both films, however, share themes of migration, the risks of displacement, and a fragile ideal of freedom and harmony.

Whale Rider begins with a failed birth in which the mother and one of the twin babies, a boy, dies. The daughter, Pai (short for Paikea), survives, much to the disgust of the grandfather, Koro, who was hoping for a boy to continue the line of chiefs he represents. The father of Pai leaves New Zealand in sadness at his loss and in disgust at his own father’s attitude, though her grandparents bring up Pai. The grandfather attempts to revitalize the traditions of the tribe by educating the young boys of the community in the customs of the past. Despite her continuing efforts to join the training, Pai, as a female, is excluded from this process. Eventually, all the boys fail the final test to be a chief, diving for Koro’s carved whale tooth, which he has thrown in the sea. It will be Pai who will prove herself as the next leader both by recovering the tooth and by showing her ability to connect with the whales.

The whales in the film are integral to the notion of tribal identity. The people’s ancestor, Paikea, came to New Zealand on the back of a whale. Although most of the story is taken up with Pai’s struggle with masculine tradition as embodied by her grandfather, the figure of the whale constantly haunts the edges of the film in shots of the wooden sculpture of Paikea riding a whale on top of the traditional meeting house, the tooth worn around Koro’s neck, and the occasional shots of the whales underwater. At the climax of the film, a pod of whales, their bodies encrusted with barnacles, emerges to be stranded on the beach. The community, hitherto depicted as an impoverished one with most of the men seemingly unemployed or of dubious character, bands together to try to keep the whales alive and shift them back into the sea. They fail. However, Pai climbs onto the back of the main whale, kicks the sides like a horse, and rides the whale out to sea -- eventually disappearing under the waves. At this point, Koro finally understands that Pai is the next leader. Her time in the water will be the liminal zone of her rite of passage. When she comes back, rescued from the sea, her new status will be properly recognized.

If one reads this film not only as a film about humans but also as a story about the manner in which animals mark all the key points that bind a community -- its foundation, the passages of its inheritances, as well as that which is essential for its continuity and survival -- then it becomes much more typical of a genre of sentimental animal films. The beaching of the whales reflects the fragile state of the tribal community, while their return to the sea marks the beginning of a new period, which also sees a shift from the traditions of male power to that of the female. A number of critics, however, have been uncomfortable with the values of the film, despite the best intentions of the filmmakers to celebrate tribal culture. Peter Bradshaw, a film critic with The Guardian, called it “risk free ethnography for an undemanding teen/family audience.” Philip Kemp, for Sight and Sound, goes further than this, accusing the film of an “essentially reactionary subtext” In other words, he implies that “fighting with bamboo sticks, apparently, carving decorative longboats and communicating with whales” are not progressive actions, nor are they practical means to revitalize a culture in the modern world beyond having a certain value for the tourist industry. There is some truth in this point -- especially in the manner in which it highlights the question of whether sentimental films like these are ultimately self-defeating when it comes to questions of preservation or even survival, be it for humans or animals. Ironically, the whale is, rather like the dolphin, the tiger, or the elephant, one of those high-profile creatures who benefits from well-organized conservation campaigns. Saving many other forms of threatened marine life or even the sea itself, issues just as pressing, seems a much more remote concern.

Ultimately, the conservatism or progressive possibilities of sentimental animal films do not seem to me to come down to the happy endings, commercialism, or even fictitious devices like communing with whales. This can just as easily have positive impacts on a culture’s attitudes and actions toward animals and other cultures as it can make people feel better in their apathy. The problem turns on the commonplace theme that animals (magically, telepathically) heal the gaps in human families so that the necessity of absent, divorcing, or dead parents -- never quite made up for by the grandparents, uncles and aunts, and foster parents that mark many animal films (and television series) -- becomes a sine qua non of human-nonhuman animal relationships. This displaces problems between humans and, indeed, between humans and animals into a mythical realm. This structure seems to be rooted in a very particular and idealized notion of human-animal relations. In part, it comes out of the ethos of pet-keeping, an especially therapeutic one, which sees animals in familial rather than community terms, and partly from a modern version of totemism. Sentimental animal films explore what it means to see animals, quite literally, as kin. In that sense, we are left with an ambivalent solution to the problem of conservatism because at another level we can see this genre of films as a form of moral pedagogy demonstrating how humans and animals can positively relate, particularly in adversity. Either way, this genre by nature cannot address the ordinariness of human-animal relationships.

In Jacques Perrin’s Winged Migration, a poetic film of birds in flight across all different parts of the world, the question of ordinariness is raised in a different way. This is not a standard natural history documentary with a detailed voiceover explaining what one is seeing. In fact, what little commentary there is almost could be cut completely, leaving one to contemplate the beauty of birds in flight and their behavior in breeding communities. Subtitles, however, do inform as to which birds are being shown and how far their journeys are. The Arctic Tern flies 12,500 miles from one polar region to the other. The sheer impressiveness of these migrations is matched by the scale of the film’s production. It took three years to make, an enormous amount of international co-operation, and a crew of more than 450. It required all manner of flying vehicles to film the different species: gliders, balloons, helicopters, light aircraft, and even computer-controlled drones. One or two critics have written that the film is interesting only for a short time and that after a while the sequences of birds flying makes one wish for a more structured approach such as one finds on the Discovery channel. This shows the extent to which we have become accommodated to a very particular type of animal documentary.

This film is similar to another film that Perrin produced, Nuridsany and Perennon’s Microcosmos (1996), which also took three years to film and was about 24 hours in the insect life of a meadow. Like Winged Migration, this was a considerable technological achievement using all manner of microscopic cameras. These included a specially designed light-weight camera in a remote controlled miniature helicopter to follow the flight of a dragonfly. In Microcosmos, there is very little commentary, and again the audience is being asked “simply” to look.

There is an interesting juxtaposition here between the idea of filming to achieve such natural images, allowing them a cinematic space uncluttered as far as possible by narrative and form and such a highly labor-intensive and hi-tech production apparatus. It gives rise to an odd sense that while watching these films one cannot quite decide which impresses one most: the astonishing beauties and surprises of nature or the cinematographic project itself.

Winged Migration is not without its contrivances. Some of the birds, such as the greylag geese, were trained. In one sequence where some red-breasted geese land in an industrial wasteland in eastern Europe, one of them gets covered in crude oil. This was, in fact, an insert shot done in a studio using milk and vegetable dye. There also is an avoidance of natural violence in the film. Scenes of birds being shot by hunters or the pollution scene just noted make a graphic point about human threats to bird migration. However, there are two other scenes -- one, in Africa, where a bird with a broken wing is set upon by crabs, and one where a baby penguin chick is taken by a pair of auks -- where the threat is shown but the moment of death is not.
This film is part of a long tradition of observing and photographing wildlife as an aesthetic exercise rather than as an epistemological one. As with Microcosmos, the audience is asked to give its time rather in the manner that a naturalist might wait patiently in the countryside to see a particular bird or insect. This is still, however, a moral project in its demonstration that these migrations are dangerous and fragile enterprises constantly under threat and in need of greater appreciation. Perhaps, in answer to the challenge that there is a lack of in-depth explanation and narrative to the film, the filmmakers might say that one could go and look up all the relevant information in a book. This distinction between a visual aesthetic knowledge and a textual scientific knowledge, which is implied by the style of Winged Migration, is reminiscent of claims made by some early nature photographers that the photography of wildlife was a different form of depicting nature than that found in science. In that sense, Winged Migration, for all its technological achievement, is more reminiscent of an old-fashioned ethos found throughout the history of nature photography (still and moving) that points toward the aesthetic wonders of nature while highlighting the novelty of its own achievement. In this case, this is a film well worth seeing for both reasons.

Note* Jonathan Burt, Cambridge


 

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