Earth

This feature-length version of the Emmy-winning BBC miniseries Planet Earth (written and directed by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield) has been playing the festival circuit and theaters overseas since 2007. For U.S. release, Disney has replaced Patrick Stewart’s narration with a new one read by James Earl Jones, adorned it with its new “Disneynature” logo and is passing it off as its own, claiming to continue the tradition of Disney’s revolutionary True Life Adventure series of the 1950s. We follow a year in the animal life of the planet—Arctic polar bears, African elephants, Antarctic penguins, etc. The scope of the subject diffuses the focus and, paradoxically, makes the movie feel both rushed and longer than its modest 96 minutes, but there’s a lot of breathtaking footage along the way.