Winged Migration (2003)

Why so much hype?

Sorry, this movie sucks

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

I didn't intend to write this commentary but after reading all of the comments I felt I had to. This movie is a work of art showing the miracle of birds and how they live and migrate with you sucked right into the experience rather than viewing it passively from afar. I have watched Attenborough's The Birds and this is better at putting you in the position of being in their feet.Imprinted birds are not tame birds. When birds hatch they imprint on the closest moving thing near them as being their parents. That was what was done here with the birds used in the flying close-ups. The person they imprint on needs to be careful to educate them that not all people will treat them nicely. I watched another film about somebody who raised wild turkeys. In the end he noticed that all of the turkeys except one eventually went on without him. For the turkey that wanted to be near him forever, their parting was violent with the turkey attacking him because he was leaving. But that does not mean that the birds didn't do what they normally would do anyway. The birds were neither tame nor trained except vis-a-vis what their natural parents would do in training them how to fly and stay alive. These bonds can be deep with the birds remembering their youthful care-takers for most of the rest of their lives. But the recognition is a two way street with the person that reared geese in another movie recognizing them from the thousands of other geese flying past a year or so later. And when he called they recognized his voice. That is what imprinting does.One negative technical point is the Canadian geese flying across Monument Valley. I am sorry, but I have never saw them in that region and I was reared near there. I saw Mallards, Teals and several other duck species but no Canadian geese or Snow geese, But when I was young I didn't see any Bald Eagles there either. The DDT crop spray had wiped the Bald Eagles out in that region. Even Golden Eagles and Buzzards were rare. If anything, this movie shows our actions do have an effect on many species and that we need to be careful so we don't harm them.It is too bad they didn't show that tiny little Hummingbirds that summer in the eastern US actually fly across the Gulf of Mexico to winter in Central America and then back again in the spring. Amazing! The only thing more miraculous is the migration of the Monarch Butterfly. The Monarch's migration isn't explained very well by Darwin's theories. It takes four generations of Monarchs to make a complete migration cycle. What that movie and this one do is show what a miracle that migration is. There are some things in which science misses the whole point. Here the central point is the miracle of birds migration.What would be nice to have in the extras on a DVD is how the four years of creating this changed the people that made it. Evidently it did something to them because it shows in the end product. I could even see that the birds of the same species have individual personalities. The only way you can get that is to live up close and personal with them for a long time.The most stunning thing about this movie is that it sucks you right in so you can see life from the perspective of the birds. For me the music enhanced rather than detracted from that experience.

Winged Migration really has some breathtaking photography of the actual flight of migratory birds. The close-ups are so vivid in motion that initially I thought that one of the birds in each group was carrying a camera attached to its body. Turns out, that is not the case and gliders were used. If you are accustomed to the documentaries on National Geographic or Discovery Channel, this film would seem to lack in certain respects. In both of those channels there is almost always a very descriptive narrative throughout nature based documentaries, whether it features birds, animals or insects. I do not hold that against Winged Migration. I feel that this film, in certain respects, establishes a sort of different genre of nature-documentary films. Human intervention has been left to the very bare minimum and the viewer is left to spin his own story around the visual. The narrative is occasionally used, but more often the name of the bird in a subtitle suffices. The sound, though, is different from the visual aspect. The intrusion of music is clear and very well defined. The choice of music too fits well with the sensibilities of the subject matter (and the particular scene). The end result is that the viewer feels he or she is actually on a flight alongside these dozens of different migratory birds flying across land and sea.Interesting Trivia - Check the fascinating Arctic Fern which flies some 12,500 miles twice each year, from the Arctic to Antarctic!Sandy, NY.x------------------------------------------xhttp://thetruthoath.blogspot.com/2008/05/idea-of-flight.html

A fine french documentary about migratory birds, by the same team that made the insect documentary "Microcosmos". You are likely to be awed by these images, and wonder "how did they film this" all the time. Unfortunately, I also had a few reservations: one (a minor, perhaps) is that the documentary is a bit too long, even for the most enthusiasts of bird lovers. Second, the version I saw in the cinema was dubbed in a very strongly accented English, which was distractive. Third (and perhaps more seriously), some of the sequences are obviously staged (for example, a parrot escaping from a cage in the Amazon): for a movie that purports to be a documentary, seeing something to be staged is an obvious disappointment. These criticisms aside, I believe this movie is very much worthwhile watching.

As the sun sets somewhere along the western coast of Africa, grotesque, spidery silhouettes gang up on a wounded bird. It was difficult to watch. Yet, it was visually mesmerizing. The crabs were hideous beyond description. Mercifully, the more brutal aspect of this scenario was apparently edited out.Nature is brutal. I personally find little enjoyment in watching predators kill and devour their prey. The baby penguin being torn to pieces by the gull in "March of the Penguins" was unpleasant to watch.Nature films like "Winged Migration" are usually rated G, but one should use caution when showing such films to children. Depending on how sensitive a child may be, some images in nature may prove to be psychologically traumatizing. Fortunately, most film makers of nature know what to edit out when depicting violence in the animal world.The French are good documentary film makers. They know how to capture the beauty found in nature and they can easily be relied upon to reveal its cruelty.