Winged Migration (Special Edition)

Winged Migration (Special Edition)
by Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats

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Movie Reviews of Winged Migration (Special Edition)

Movie Review: Soaring Rapture Above The Clouds of Creation
Summary: 5 Stars

Winged Migration (2001, French original title: Peuple migrateur, Le) lavished upon all the cinema going multitudes of 2002 a unprecedented and wholly unanticipated bountifully fertile untarnished tapestry of the untamed physical world with the infinitely ambiguous wonderment and dizzyingly uncontrolled amazement that effortlessly made pale all the Burly Brawls, digital interstate car chases, and animatronics robotic sophistication that you're ever likely to see from going to the movies this year or last. Co-directed by Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats (assistant director on Himalaya (1999)), and Jacques Perrin (also the film's "lively" narrator and financial producer), Winged Migration was an improbably painstaking four-year documentary film project that in truly bewilderingly epic form gallantly attempts and conclusively unnaturally accomplishes unnaturally to crowingly focus on the spring and fall migrations of over a dozen species of birds around the globe , as they unflinchingly travel across the unending countryside, transcontinental oceanic divides, and the brutal violations of the archaically blind elements to reach their summer and winter resting places before the treacherous immovable progression of the seasons finally catches up with them. It's an astronomical biological race against time as the lives of untold flocks of pelicans, albatrosses, south Atlantic king penguins, bald eagles, geese of all denominations, and the levitating dominion of flying birds everywhere encroachingly invade upon the inarticulate inexpressible promised lands of their own birth where millions expire along the way and millions more are breathed into existence. This premise may sound very absurd to those weaned on the technologically vacuous bins of mindlessly ridiculous entertainment that obstinately gag the imagination of tomorrow's adults (yes please, can we watch See Spot Run, Good Boy, Cat in the Hat, or Scooby Doo, can we Mom, can we, can we?). Increasingly though the dramatic life and death results of Winged Migration's pristinely rendered families of birds on the run from nature's densely unforgiving clock is so much more moving, in all the absolute concrete conviction of that word.

Bewitchingly hearkening wordless grandeur, gliding on the adamantly unspecified unlimited fringes of mystic atmosphere over pressurized sky, these mystic weightless ambassadors of expeditious flight have agelessly inspired numerous laments on the immeasurable vastness of nature, here is another mercilessly inspiring flabbergasting ode to the incalculable wonders that lay beyond human identification. Riding the bottomless untold expanses of furiously relentless sky and unyieldingly lasting longer than recorded time itself, birds remain to some an eternal bridge to the unconscious will of cosmic inception. These fluttering endlessly ascending vessels of peerless clandestine design aerodynamically master the inconceivably unfathomable and morally unwitting every single day of their essentially anonymous lives. Yet there is no hesitation no lapsing of fundamental responsibility to live on, to carry the seed of antiquity to the next generation, and inscribe the craft of memory to the physically monogamous allegiances of the future. The congenital disposition and abstinent resolve to pass down what once was to what will be remains agelessly stupefying no matter how many times you experience it.

These thousand, multi-thousand, and hundreds of miles of globetrotting that compose those grasping strides for life are splendorous and astonishing in of themselves, and yet they invariably take place equally in the ethereal pressurized envelope of space just as judiciously and fatefully as below beneath the shadow of gusting air as life's numerous channels of providence and circumstance work themselves through to their inevitable conclusions. Waiting there in the camera's lens by their side, you encounter and witness the unwontedly uncognitive wilderness of causality as what must be done is ultimately achieved given the will of nature's equilibrium. The randomness of slaughter as an undefended baby penguin chick is left vulnerable for the submissively compliant lunges of gratification, the biological terrorism of removing the fruits of one breed and remorselessly replacing them with another, the instinctive deployment of problem solving skills desperately needed to emancipate one from captivity, and the elastic charismatic expanding of nature to fill all of those little problems that may just have palpable answers beyond the enclosure of understanding allows, including the contorting of a fish to invariably go down one's throat more effortlessly. For these birds, existence remains the attainable only through the incomprehensible of the never-ending. As you attentively witness the perceived balladic ballet of weightless enveloping masses of birds breathlessly cascading across the endless mammoth body of insurmountable sky throughout this incredibly accomplished film, you view the intangible all-encompassing purity of nature unviolated and unblemished by man's sometimes sanctimoniously shallow and peripherally narcissistic viewing of her.

As for the DVD edition of Winged Migration, it includes an impressive 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation, a ravishing Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track, director's commentary, documentary supplements, and so much more.

P.S. Show this to all the children you love.

Summary of Winged Migration (Special Edition)