B

The crawls at the end of this documentary by Jacques Perrin run as long as those on the most complicated CGI blockbusters produced by contemporary Hollywood, despite the fact that there’s not a single special-effects shot in it. That’s because the effort to record the travels of various species of migratory birds required raising the subjects from egg to maturity in order to make them comfortable with the photographers and their equipment, devising innovative ways of filming them in flight, and shooting reams of stock in order to catch them just as they pass landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Center and Monument Valley or swoop up just in time to avoid an avalanche. The figures are astonishing: filming continued for nearly three years in some forty countries, and involved more than four hundred crew members.

The effort has certainly paid off in a wealth of beautiful, breathtaking close-up shots of flocks on the wing. There’s a “you are there” quality to these sequences that’s truly remarkable. And yet, though one hesitates to make such an observation about so visually amazing an effort, as a whole “Winged Migration” is rather repetitive and strangely detached. As magnificent as the accomplishment of placing cameras in the midst of flocks moving above the clouds might be, the effect pales after an hour or so. And when hunters shoot down some ducks we’ve been watching on their long journey or an injured gull is attacked by some voracious crabs, the effect is shocking but not emotionally overwhelming.

That’s because, with only a couple of exceptions, the birds don’t exhibit a great deal of–for lack of a better word–personality. If you compare this film with “Microcosmos,” the 1996 close-up view of the insect world that Perrin also produced, the subjects here are nowhere near as engaging; none of the birds even begins to match the wonderfully industrious dung beetle of the older picture. The problem is that when one gets right down to it, the title of the film is all too accurate–it’s exclusively about the migration process, and so we’re shown very little beyond the birds flying thousands of miles in search of food and back again. Though there’s some narration (haltingly delivered by Perrin), it’s mostly of the slight, vaguely poetic variety, and offers very little of the ornithological information that might have broadened a viewer’s understanding. Ultimately we don’t learn as much from “Winged Migration” as we’d like.

Which is not to say that it isn’t worth watching: there’s enough purely visual splendor here to make the picture a must-see for nature-lovers. In the final analysis, however, these winged creatures aren’t nearly as lovable as the bugs from “Microcosmos” which they so assiduously devour.