Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Winged Migration

Movie Guru Rating:

Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

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Peck This

Winged Migration never takes off

by Adrienne Martini

I am not a bird person. It's not that I wish them ill—birds, after all, have their own little niche in which to squawk—but I don't feel much of anything towards them. I wasn't traumatized by Hitchcock or Big Bird or the duck at the Peabody in Memphis who bit my finger. I just don't find them particularly interesting.

Usually, I can overcome my indifference in the presence of a well-made documentary. Spellbound left me so, even though I feel the same lack of emotion about spelling bees that I do about our feathered friends. Even the lack of a plot won't deter me. Baraka was captivating poetry, despite not retaining anything that could be described as a storyline. I can be won over, is what I'm saying. While birds don't move me, a good film does, no matter what the subject.

Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration is all about a year in the life of the avian set, as they travel from north to south and back again. There is a lot of flying. Some birds don't complete the journey, of course, but most do. And then they do it again the next year. At some level, Migration�is simply a metaphor about the human condition (and given the degree to which Perrin anthropomorphizes his subjects, the comparison is not a tricky one to make). But, mostly, it's about the flying.

We're treated to soaring montages that make you feel as if you are flying along. On a technical level, this project was immense, spanning three years, seven continents and 450 crew members. Ultralights and hot air balloons soared along with these flappers and captured footage that is truly remarkable. Judged by those criteria, Winged Migration is magnificent for these passages alone.

As breathtaking as it is at first, after the sixth or seventh time around, the flying starts to lose its luster. Sure, the birds are different, but the concept remains the same. Birds fly. When Perrin adds to the flapping yet another reprise of Bruno Coulais' heavy-handed score—which sounds like something a teenage boy composed on his Casio keyboard in 1983—the aggregate effect flops like a penguin onto dry land. You can feel Perrin trying to jerk your heartstrings in that stereotypically Gallic, overly sentimental way. You can almost picture him weeping from the sheer beauty of it all as he edited all of the raw footage.

Speaking of which, the editing is pretty clunky as well. While Perrin assures us in the opening credits that no special effects were used, it would be interesting to hear what his definition of "special effects" is. No computer-generated effects are evident, sure, but there are quite a few instances of effects created through splicing together bits that could not have happened simultaneously, then trying to pass them off as if they did, like the footage involving an avalanche and a flock. Either the film crew was remarkably lucky and daring or there had to be some b-roll cut in.

Perrin also clearly used some stunt birds, like the bit with a young boy cutting a bird free from a net. This bird, who conveniently retains a portion of the net around his (or her, it's hard to tell with birds) leg for the duration of the film, turning up at the most convenient times, then returning to the same pond where the same boy just happens to be. I don't mind suspending my disbelief, but Migration doesn't really help its own case by assuring us that everything is real.

Reality is a slippery subject, especially in Perrin's world. He gave us the same sort of manipulated verisimilitude with Microcosmos, his bird's-eye view of the world of bugs. With Microcosmos, you constantly had the sense that the director's hand was ready to flick his actors back into the scene should they wander off. With Migration, Perrin has kept no secrets about raising some of his feathered subject in very controlled environments, keeping cameras whirring around their eggs, then ensuring that a human was the first thing the bird saw. The result is that some of his wild birds are no longer really wild. So while their flight was not created in a hard drive in L.A., it also wasn't free of human meddling.

Perrin's adjustments don't really matter if you're simply keen to see some birds or need something curse-free to take the rugrats to. But for non-birdophiles, Migration is an exercise that never quite gets off of the ground.