A walrus family faces the threat of climate change in the film Arctic Tale. (Paul Nicklen/Paramount Classics) Arctic Tale is a cuddly, old-school wilderness parable where the anthropomorphized baby polar bears have names and a herd of flatulent walruses cavort together on a rock slab to We Are Family. What’s less cute is the film’s alarming environmental message: by 2040, the summer sea ice so integral to the survival of these glorious animals could be entirely melted, yet another disastrous byproduct of global warming.
Victoria-based filmmakers — and married couple — Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson spent 15 years shooting about 800 hours of footage in the Canadian Arctic. The result is a feature film that its marketers are probably praying will have the double-whammy box office effect of a March of the Penguins-An Inconvenient Truth mash-up (in fact, the two companies that made those films, National Geographic and Paramount Vantage, backed Arctic Tale).
Narrated with alto-sass by Queen Latifah, Arctic Tale follows a polar bear cub, given the Inuktuk-derived name Nanu, and a walrus pup, called Seela, as they grow up confronting natural predators and warming temperatures that make hunting near impossible, and starvation near inevitable. “It’s not a documentary,” says co-director Robertson, a former journalist born in Toronto. “We’re constructing a narrative to tell a story about animals and climate change.”
We talked to Robertson and Ravetch, who also served as the film’s cinematographer, about single-mom polar bears, bear burritos and not knowing Al Gore.
Q: How did the film change from its conception 15 years ago to what we see today?
Adam Ravetch: In the beginning we were young, ambitious filmmakers attracted to the North and looking for a region and animals that are relatively unknown. Shortly after we went up there, I was told not to swim with a walrus, because it could hold me and hug me and knock my head off and suck my brains out — that’s the story I heard from an Inuit family that we first worked with. That scared and terrified us, but we were also surprised that there was still a large animal on the planet that we didn’t know very much about. We thought we would just shoot, maybe the footage would be archived. Soon after that we built a shark cage for the underwater sequences, but we took it very slow. We didn’t want to be hugged and held to death.
Sarah Robertson: In those first encounters underwater we were amazed how social [the walruses] were. In the seal world, walruses are very unique, because they actually nurture their young for three years, where normally seals would just give birth and nurse their pups maybe for 10 days, and then abandon them. We also found that older sibling walruses would help out with newborns, playing “auntie,” and that astonished us. With the polar bear cub, also, the mother has a three-year investment period. That’s interesting. We loved the single bear mom trying to bring up her cubs juxtaposed with the walrus herd, which is a much more social structure that brings up their calves together.
Filmmaker Adam Ravetch, holding equipment, and Inuit guide Andrew record a walrus singing. (Arctic Bear Productions/Paramount Classics) Q: You brought your three young children to the Canadian Arctic while filming. What was daily life like up there?
http://tinyurl.com/26nal8
Victoria-based filmmakers — and married couple — Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson spent 15 years shooting about 800 hours of footage in the Canadian Arctic. The result is a feature film that its marketers are probably praying will have the double-whammy box office effect of a March of the Penguins-An Inconvenient Truth mash-up (in fact, the two companies that made those films, National Geographic and Paramount Vantage, backed Arctic Tale).
Narrated with alto-sass by Queen Latifah, Arctic Tale follows a polar bear cub, given the Inuktuk-derived name Nanu, and a walrus pup, called Seela, as they grow up confronting natural predators and warming temperatures that make hunting near impossible, and starvation near inevitable. “It’s not a documentary,” says co-director Robertson, a former journalist born in Toronto. “We’re constructing a narrative to tell a story about animals and climate change.”
We talked to Robertson and Ravetch, who also served as the film’s cinematographer, about single-mom polar bears, bear burritos and not knowing Al Gore.
Q: How did the film change from its conception 15 years ago to what we see today?
Adam Ravetch: In the beginning we were young, ambitious filmmakers attracted to the North and looking for a region and animals that are relatively unknown. Shortly after we went up there, I was told not to swim with a walrus, because it could hold me and hug me and knock my head off and suck my brains out — that’s the story I heard from an Inuit family that we first worked with. That scared and terrified us, but we were also surprised that there was still a large animal on the planet that we didn’t know very much about. We thought we would just shoot, maybe the footage would be archived. Soon after that we built a shark cage for the underwater sequences, but we took it very slow. We didn’t want to be hugged and held to death.
Sarah Robertson: In those first encounters underwater we were amazed how social [the walruses] were. In the seal world, walruses are very unique, because they actually nurture their young for three years, where normally seals would just give birth and nurse their pups maybe for 10 days, and then abandon them. We also found that older sibling walruses would help out with newborns, playing “auntie,” and that astonished us. With the polar bear cub, also, the mother has a three-year investment period. That’s interesting. We loved the single bear mom trying to bring up her cubs juxtaposed with the walrus herd, which is a much more social structure that brings up their calves together.
Filmmaker Adam Ravetch, holding equipment, and Inuit guide Andrew record a walrus singing. (Arctic Bear Productions/Paramount Classics)
http://tinyurl.com/26nal8