Cult nature documentary
Job description: Every once in a while, a documentary comes along that takes everyone by surprise and makes the leap from Discovery Channel fodder to bona fide box-office bonanza. It's a curious alchemy, and even the directors are usually unsure how they created their hit, or how to replicate the feat. The best examples shed new light on nature, and take us to that transcendental state where the impossible beauty and magical savagery of the world in which we exist is revealed anew on the big screen in all its technicolour glory.
Most recently seen in: The Emperor's Journey, a US$8 million documentary about the Emperor penguins' annual Antarctic odyssey, made by French biologist Luc Jacquet. The film usurped most of the summer blockbusters at the US box office, and has now been claimed by conservatives as a poke in the eye to evolutionary theory. The penguins are the new poster critters for so-called intelligent design and a potent advertisement for family values, as the comical-looking birds waddle through blinding blizzards and minus 40 degree Celsius temperatures with their lifelong mates to get to their breeding grounds, where they raise their offspring with fortitude and tenderness.
After laying an egg, the female penguins trek back to the ocean to feed, while the males under-take a two-month vigil with their eggs cradled at their feet. For the US version, Morgan Freeman lent his profoundest tones to the narration. Critic Michael Medved called it 'the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child-rearing'.
Most likely to say: 'Qwaark qwaark qwaaark - brrrrrrr.'
Classics of the genre: The Living Desert, Disney's first feature-length documentary in 1953, offered an incredible exploration of nature in the desert using then-unheard of camera techniques. The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) is an interesting addition to the genre, with amazing shots of insects, amid apocalyptic warnings about a showdown between those with six legs and those with two. Anthropomorphists would have rejoiced in Animals are Beautiful People (1974) - by Jamie Uys, who went on to make The Gods Must be Crazy - about the creatures of the Kalahari Desert, showing how close their behaviour was to that of humans. Dope-smokers everywhere will have blown their minds to Godfrey Reggio's operatic Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Honourable mention also goes to Winged Migration (2001), a beautiful meditation by Frenchman Jacques Perrin on the annual pilgrimages of birds.
Ultimate avatar: The Silent World, Louis Malle's 1953 film of Jacques Cousteau and his crew getting up close and personal with the denizens of the deep. If you caught Wes Anderson's Cousteau-meets-Clouseau spoof The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, you'll see where he got his inspiration.