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'Earth': Its photography is grand, narration less so

Is that the sonorous baritone of Mufasa, a.k.a. James Earl Jones, waxing poetic about "the circle of life"? What's this - Lion King III?

Lions wait for dark to fall before hunting elephants in Botswana's Kalahari Desert. The film deals gently with global warming.
Lions wait for dark to fall before hunting elephants in Botswana's Kalahari Desert. The film deals gently with global warming.Read more

Is that the sonorous baritone of Mufasa, a.k.a. James Earl Jones, waxing poetic about "the circle of life"? What's this - Lion King III?

No, it's Earth, the inaugural release from Disney's Disneynature division, a wide-screen wildlife documentary in which the cycles of birth and death, migrations and seasons, are captured in stunning - absolutely stunning - ways.

Baby seals glowing in the light of dusk, a dense flock of cranes scudding across the sky, a lynx in a conifer forest, ducklings tumbling from a tree, fluttering their stubby wings, and yes, a pride of lions prowling around - isn't the world a magical place?

Well, it is, but you kind of wish Jones would stop saying "magical" - and "circle of life," and making cutesy-poo observations on the order of "unlike humans, polar bear cubs don't always listen to their moms."

Directed by British wildlife filmmakers Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, Earth - opening, not coincidentally, on Earth Day - soars above and swoops down on continents (all seven of 'em), diving beneath the waves to find birds and beasts, mammals and fish, all doing the things they do to survive.

Although the narration is too bland and anthropomorphically inclined, Earth does acknowledge the effect global warming has had on our planet and its occupants - but gently, so as not to give its youngest audience members nightmares. The poor polar bear dad that wanders off in search of food while the mother and her two cubs emerge from hibernation has an especially rough go of it on the melting ice. The severe droughts in the Kalahari test a baby elephant's stamina. Rain forests are losing their trees.

It took Messrs. Fothergill and Linfield five years to photograph these creatures and landscapes, and the results are dazzling and dramatic. The filmmakers use time-lapse photography to winning effect, and ease their way into the life-and-death matter of the food chain: There's a terrific sequence, shot from overhead, of a wolf chasing down a caribou calf, but the film cuts away before the final, fatal moment.

Later, however, a gang of lions isolate a full-grown elephant in an African oasis, and a night-vision camera captures the deadly attack in thrilling detail. One lion claws its way atop the giant pachyderm, while others go for the legs, the head. It's a ferocious mugging.

But hey, as Mufasa reminds us, it's all part of the cycle of life.