The Crimson Wing

Good for more than just prettying up Christopher Cross album covers, the flamingo is a fascinating creature that rarely gets its documentary due — but all that has changed with Disneynature’s The Crimson Wing. Don’t believe flamingos can hold your attention for 78 minutes? Turn on your hi-def set and prepare to get pink.

Synopsis: Discover one of nature’s last great mysteries in The Crimson Wing, a miraculous story of love, courage and survival from Disneynature, the studio that brought you Earth. In a place like no other on the planet, the dramatic and desolate Lake Natron in northern Tanzania, you’ll witness a spectacle unlike anything you’ve seen before: a million crimson-winged flamingos arrive to continue the circle of life. Focusing on the adventures of a single chick set against a backdrop of never-before-filmed landscapes, The Crimson Wing is a visually stunning journey into the life and struggles of the mysterious and inspiring flamingo. Video: You can’t have a nature documentary without spectacular visuals, and The Crimson Wing‘s 1080p transfer brings it to home theaters in all its brilliant glory. This is a movie about thousands upon thousands of birds, so there’s often an awful lot to take in on the screen, and there are moments when the picture can’t quite keep up — but the errors are slight, and really, unless you’re looking for flaws, you’ll be too busy gaping at the screen to notice. The colors are rich, the contrast is clear, and the details are crisp; The Crimson Wing is a feast for the eyes.

Audio: This isn’t exactly Shark Week, so don’t expect a lot of booming action, but the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack has plenty of dynamic range, and a fine balance between the birds and the score (supplied by something called the Cinematic Orchestra). The Crimson Wing is definitely toward the slower, more contemplative end of the nature documentary spectrum, and the soundtrack is a fine companion — absorbing, but never showy or distracting.

Special Features: Most movies of this sort don’t include a whole lot in the way of bonus content, and Crimson Wing is no different; the only really substantial features are the “filmmaker annotations” track, which adds pop-up/picture-in-picture content like trivia and interviews to the film, and five brief featurettes (all together, they add up to about 20 minutes in length). The rest of the special features are basically throwaway stuff, like a screensaver and trailers for other Disney films; having said that, Wing does pack in a DVD copy of the movie, which is always a great added value, especially for family titles like this one.

Bottom Line: Parents of young children will likely be of two minds about Crimson Wing — on one hand, it’s great to see Disney reviving the nature documentary tradition they established with their True Life Adventures series decades ago; on the other hand, this is a deceptively dark and violent film for a G-rated feature. Personally, I think it’s important for kids to understand the violence of nature — but even for sensitive adults, there are some parts of this movie that will be difficult to watch, like the scenes of baby flamingos being hunted by storks or struggling under the weight of salt spurs. As with anything else, you should either watch it first or watch it with your kids; don’t trust Disney to do your babysitting for you. All that said, though, this is an excellent documentary, unusually thoughtful and stunning to look at in the bargain.

Oceans

We seem to be living in an unusually prolific time for nature documentaries — I think this is the third underwater doc I’ve reviewed for Dadnabbit in the past year or so — but who’s complaining? We know next to nothing about the world around us, particularly the ocean, and between filmmaking innovations and the advent of hi-def home theaters, exploring the planet from the comfort of your couch is more fun than ever. For their follow-up to Earth, Disneynature decided to plunge into the sea with directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, and the movie they fished out — the appropriately titled Oceans – is another worthy addition to your HD wildlife collection.

Synopsis: Disneynature, the studio that presented the record-breaking film Earth, now brings Oceans to the screen. Nearly three-quarters of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, and Oceans boldly chronicles the mysteries that lie beneath. Directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud dive deep into the very waters that sustain all of mankind –exploring the playful splendor and the harsh reality of the weird and wonderful creatures that live within. Featuring spectacular never-before-seen imagery captured by the latest underwater technologies, Oceans offers an unprecedented look beneath the sea in a powerful yet enchanting motion picture.

Video: Movies like this are all about the picture, and with Oceans, Disneynature extends the impeccable track record they started with Earth. It is, in a word, dazzling. Perrin and Cluzaud take a meditative approach to their filmmaking, never forceful or showy, and it’s the perfect approach for this beautifully photographed film; they let their subjects — and the breathtaking levels of detail their cameras capture — speak for themselves. This is showroom stuff, the kind of thing you can take out and turn on to impress your non-HD friends.

Audio: You might not think Oceans‘ audio would matter much, but the filmmakers clearly disagreed, putting together a deeply immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack that takes advantage of each channel to surround the viewer. The narration is usually the worst part of these movies, but Pierce Brosnan acquits himself admirably here, and while he takes up the center, the sounds of the ocean and its residents blend with Bruno Coulais’ beautiful score to fill in the rest. It’s soothing, oddly hypnotic, and altogether impressive — one of the best I’ve heard, really.

Special Features: You don’t really look for tons of special features in movies like Oceans, and the selection here is typically slim — a smattering of bonus videos, a self-congratulatory Disneynature profile, and a deeply unnecessary music video from Joe Jonas and Demi Lovato take up the bulk. But the one feature worth accessing is really pretty terrific: the picture-in-picture “Filmmakers Annotations” track that adds interviews, trivia, behind-the-scenes clips, and other footage to the movie. When your kids ask to watch Oceans again (and they will), do it with this turned on.

Bottom Line: It’s easy to be cynical about any major corporation that undertakes a public greening campaign, and Disneynature is no different. But there’s no arguing with the quality of the studio’s offerings, which also include the flamingo documentary Crimson Wing (to be covered in another post). In a kids’ entertainment landscape littered with noisy cartoons and crappy toy tie-ins, there’s a lot to be said for a movie this quietly contemplative, and one that makes such a carefully considered effort to teach viewers about the interconnected (ahem) nature of life. Dive in.

Disney took some heat for the way Earth was assembled, and perhaps rightly so; it’s basically a boiled-down version of the BBC’s mammoth Planet Earth series, and though it uses some footage that wasn’t aired on the show, it’s still mostly reheated goods. But nobody wants to watch seven and a half hours of anything in a theater, and this is Disney — they’re aiming Earth at kids, whose attention spans are built for the film’s 90-minute length. This is actually one of the first projects from the studio’s new Disneynature banner, intended to expose the Disney demographic to the sights and sounds of the world around us, which is awfully hard to complain about. Even if you were enthralled by Planet Earth during its TV run, in other words, don’t be so quick to write off Earth as its shrimpier cousin; in any house with kids, it’s got a charm all its own.

As you might expect, the movie’s narrative structure is also condensed. Led by some typically stentorian narration from James Earl Jones, Earth follows the travels (and travails) of three animal families — polar bears, elephants, and humpback whales — as they migrate in search of food, water, and shelter. Given the film’s target audience, it should not surprise you that it’s been carefully edited to omit most of Mother Nature’s darker side; although we do see some heartbreaking stuff, and there is a fair amount of animal-on-animal violence, there isn’t much in the way of blood and guts, and a precocious four-year-old should be able to take all of it in stride — with parental supervision and discussion, of course.

For adults, Earth might prove to be a bit of a snoozer, but if you’ve invested in a 1080p screen, you’ll get a kick out of how unbelievably lovely these scenes are, and how they jump off the screen. It’s a film the whole family can enjoy — for different reasons, of course, but so what?

Like other recent Disney releases, the Earth Blu-ray comes bundled with a DVD version, but the extras don’t end there. You also get a series of picture-in-picture “filmmaker annotations,” in which the folks behind the scenes talk about how different scenes were shot, which footage was left behind, and more. There’s also a 45-minute behind-the-scenes documentary, as well as a nifty little wrinkle called “Living Menus,” which lets you use the menu (updated using your Blu-ray player’s wi-fi connection) to access additional text and video information about various hotspots around the globe. On the short list of Blu-ray discs that are worth your $25, Earth ranks near the top.

Purchase Earth at Amazon on Blu-ray or standard DVD.