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?
SR: We hired Inuit people to help us find the animals, and when we started to have kids, I’d hire an Inuit family with kids of their own to come out and live on the land with us so the kids would have someone to play with.
We were living very basic in tents and igloos, travelling by dog team and sled. We were on the land for at least a month at a time, and up to five months at a time, over 15 seasons. Sometimes we’d go up in spring and summer, other times fall and winter. We’ve done every single season.Q: Any perilous moments?
AR: Originally we used tents in the summertime when the ice wasn’t there, and the bears were on the shore. They would come to us. We were woken in the middle of the night on several occasions by polar bears at the door, and we had to try to get them to go away.
SR: They don’t like noise, so you bang your pots and pans.
AR: Soon thereafter we decided that we didn’t want to be these canvas-wrapped bear burritos, so in summer we would build cabins that were much stronger.Q: We see these two “lead character” animals born, and age, but they’re composites.
SR: The composites are really representations of the best of walrus and bear that we’ve found in 15 years. The film for us is a celebration of these animals’ qualities, and their ability to adapt and survive.
AR: It would be physically impossible to follow a single animal for several seasons of its life. But we went back to the very same places time and time again. There was a lot of waiting. Weather is a huge factor in the Arctic. We would get about two filming days out of every 25 or 30.Q: Did you have any of the over-attachment issues with these animals that Werner Herzog captured in Grizzly Man, his documentary about Timothy Treadwell, the American naturalist who deluded himself to death that he and the bears were equals?
AR: No, because we didn’t want to get eaten. That was a goal.
SR: But I don’t think we ever became attached to the animals the way it was depicted in Grizzly Man. Sure, you’re amazed by them and you have a level of astonishment and surprise at what they can do, but we never felt that we were one with these animals in the way that he seemed to be. These are huge predators. We didn’t forget that.
Filmmaker Sarah Robertson bundles up in the Canadian Arctic. (Arctic Bear Productions/Paramount Classics)
Q: And yet, one of the criticisms lobbed at the film is that it’s a bit too cutesy. In an otherwise very positive review, the New York Times called it “treacly” in parts.
SR: Well, we start the movie with baby animals, who are cute. They’re wonderful to watch. Who doesn’t like baby anything? But they grow up, and then we show how these animals really live. The bears are hunting other animals. There’s predation. I think actually there are some very adult themes and messages that aren’t cutesy at all.
AR: Of course we wanted to make the movie for kids, for young people, so they could identify with these animals. A big theme of ours is that young people are disconnected from the natural world, and too protected from what goes on in the natural world, and that’s part of the problem. We want to inspire them, and show them that our actions do affect the natural world.Q: You guys have impeccable timing considering the momentum of An Inconvenient Truth and the Live Earth concerts.
SR: It’s really coincidental. Five years ago, we started seeing climate change happen in the Arctic, and we felt it should be part of the movie because it was forcing these animals to make new decisions. Fifteen years ago, science told us that bears and walruses rarely came together. In our experience in the Arctic, we’ve seen that notion contradicted. Today, bear-walrus interaction is an entirely predictable event, and that’s because bears and walruses have been driven together as the ice melts, forced to find new food sources.Q: But the films are linked even further in the opening credits when one of the co-writers is identified as Kristin Gore, Al Gore’s daughter.
SR: Right, she’s a comedy writer [for Saturday Night Live, Futurama]. She just came in at the very end of the movie to try to help us write some of the funny lines.Q: You guys don’t hang with Al Gore?
AR: No. Not in that sense.Arctic Tale opens in Toronto Aug. 3 and in other Canadian cities Aug. 17.
Katrina Onstad writes for CBCNews.ca Arts.
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