Arctic Tale

Today, the whole grade 11 watched a movie called Arctic tale. This is a documentary film made by the National Geography in 2007. The film itself took fifteen years to make because everything is live footage and it is talking about the cycle of two animals, polar bears and walruses. It is so well filmed; many people couldn’t believe that it’s a documentary. The main idea for this film is to show the lifestyle of polar bear and walrus, and also to show the devastating effect global warming are having to the north pole.

This film clearly showed the reality of both polar bears and walrus’s lifestyle. I learnt that male polar bear might attack female of youth bears for unknown reasons. The fact that baby walrus can memorize the whiskers on the elder walruses is incredibly amazing. I’m also shocked that polar bear can smell through 3 feet of ice and then break open the ice by stamping their front feet on it.

During this movie, there are many peaceful and funny moments which I would love to share with you, but I don’t want to lost track of the main reason of this movie. I believe this movie is really trying to get two ideas across. First, they want to use footages to show that animals DO have feelings. This a very big problem in our society right now. Many scientists refuse to agree that animals have feeling and cruelly perform vivisection on animals. Anthropomorphism becomes something that scientist refuse to get close to and this idea disseminated and influenced most of the young scientist. To proof the scientist wrong, the narrator used a very extreme method. Throughout the whole movie, Queen Latifah anthropomorphized everything and I have to admit that she did a terrific job. I don’t know if animals have feeling or not, and I don’t want this post to be controversy.

I think, the main idea for this movie is to show the devastating effect global warming has to the North Pole. The movie shows how many animals are forced to face a totally different environment and many died because they couldn’t adapt to this new environment fast enough. In the footages, it shows how dangerous it is for both polar bears and walruses because their environment changed so much. Polar bears are having difficult times crossing the ice because it is too thin for them and walrus are forced to find lands that are hard enough for them for the same reason. It is like watching the last 20min of Titanic because many walruses are forced to stay underwater because there are no ices that could support them.

When I saw the whole fleet of walruses fled into the open sea to find a harder land, I felt extremely shameful. These walruses are at risk because of me. My convenient life results in their death and I’m very shameful for that.

At last, I strongly recommend everyone to watch this movie. It gives positive influence to little kids because it not only improves their knowledge on the animals, but they could also be more aware of the reality. This could also help teenagers and adults. I know that everyone knows global warming very well, but not everyone know the effect it has on the environment. There for, I believe this movie should be watched by everyone.