March Of The Penguins caused a sensation with simplicity

Winged Migration earned an Oscar nomination and over $11M at the box office. March Of The Penguins won its Oscar, and made over $127M.

It’s an incredible haul, outgrossed in the feature documentary space only by Michaels Jackson (This Is It) and Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11). It also left a cultural footprint far bigger than its subjects’ webbed feet. It’s got name recognition, rare for any documentary, and is seemingly the only documentary to have been turned into a video game for the Game Boy Advance. And while March Of The Penguins didn’t necessarily lead to the subsequent animated penguin boom—with Happy Feet, Surf’s Up, and Madagascar all hitting theaters over the next two years—it did identify something essential that these films capitalized on: People love penguins. 

Bipedal, portly, flightless birds who must walk like the clumsiest humans amongst us across the harshest climate on the planet? They’re prime candidates for anthropomorphized antics, which March Of The Penguins wastes no time getting into, translating their mating habits, feeding patterns, and locomotion into demystified terms that any cinemagoer could wrap their heads around. Why do the penguins do what they do? Monogamous family-oriented love, of course. Well, kind of. The frigid waters got so muddy when it came to conservative commentators’ responses to the film that the director had to weigh in, calling the family values tie “intellectually dishonest,” and explaining that “you have to let penguins be penguins and humans be humans.” It’s a good response to weirdos reading too much into your movie, but it’s also a little dishonest in its own right—this film became such a success, in part, because of how it told penguins’ stories in human terms.

It also became a success because the voice telling that story belonged to Morgan Freeman. Picking up the threads of The Shawshank Redemption, where Freeman was the audience’s poignant guide through Stephen King’s prison, and Bruce Almighty, where he was literally God, March Of The Penguins further weaponized the actor’s omniscient syrupy tones as he turned absurd birds sliding on their bellies into epic romance. In the 20 years since, Freeman’s become the crème de la crème of voiceover talent; a fact directly parodied by writer-director Bob Saget’s 2007 film Farce Of The Penguins, where Samuel L. Jackson fills in as the foul-mouthed Freeman foil.

Even more interesting than Farce Of The Penguins being a direct parody of a documentary (not quite as strange as a handheld video game, but still weird) is how specifically it mimics its source. Sagat’s stock-footage flop is horrible—a drunk shock jock’s take on Walk On The Wild Side—but it also follows the plot and form of March Of The Penguins pretty closely, leaning on its audience’s knowledge of that film’s structure, subject matter, narrative framing, and even poetic phrasing. March guided its audience’s emotional projections onto the animals, be it during beak-nuzzling love scenes or in its bleakly framed tragedies, like when a lone penguin wanders off into white oblivion or when a grieving parent prods hopelessly at its dead chick. Farce, with its story of two fratty penguin bros on a quest to get laid, at least took away that telling, rather than showing, was a key factor for mass success—even during raunchy penguin sex scenes.

More serious films were taking note too. Oceans, the 2010 follow-up film from the Winged Migration team that came out in a post-March world, had learned what U.S. audiences needed for documentaries to explode out of the arthouse. As St. James described, “the American version features Pierce Brosnan’s voice refusing to let the once again jaw-dropping footage speak for itself”—footage that was shorter and more palatable than that shown to international audiences.

And that watering-down that’s trickled from Antarctica into the Oceans hasn’t been limited to the big screen. David Attenborough’s early-00s series for the BBC, The Blue Planet and The Life Of Mammals, were groundbreakingly intimate and scientifically-minded. Attenborough’s post-March series Planet Earth leaned further into its narratives, making its majestic natural beauty more accessible than ever—and a bigger hit than any of its predecessors. The first episode, which aired just three months after March Of The Penguins finally left theaters, followed emperor penguins as they weather the winter and nurture their new chicks.

March Of The Penguins only needed 86 minutes to make its audiences relate to some of the strangest critters in the most remote corner of our planet. It even caps its story with one final, endearing comparison: A montage plays over the credits of its death-defying crew slip-sliding around the ice in a graceless march of their own, dragging their cameras and tripods across snow drifts right alongside the birds they’re intending to film. It’s in these silent moments, captured with candid humor and hands-off style, that the connection between audience, subject, and filmmakers is most elemental—no love story required.