LancesWorld.com Journal

The documentary genre isn't one that generally strikes me as having "great films." I don't mean to say that documentaries can't have noble messages or that they aren't useful. Far from it, documentaries are often very useful. I simply mean that if you asked the average person to name their ten favorite movies, very few of them would place a documentary among their top 10. I know at least three people who probably would put one or more documentaries in their top 10, but they don't fall into what I would consider the "average movie watcher" category.

Winged Migration, however, is a documentary that I would call a great film. If I told you that it was a film about migratory patterns of bird that has barely more than no narration and not a single human character with a speaking role, you would probably think that it would be about as boring a movie as you could imagine. That's where you would be wrong. This movie has some of the most amaing cinematography that I have ever seen. You have never seen birds in this way. The camera isn't just sitting on the group shooting the sky - it is flying directly along with the birds! The effect this creates is that you, the viewer, are flying directly alongside these birds. It feels almost as if you could reach right out and touch them.

Documentary fan or not, this is a movie that you really need to see. It is more than simply a look at the migratory patterns of these birds; it is a look into the interactions of birds with members of their own and other species. You will be amazed at what some of these birds do. From walking on water to playing peek-a-boo to avoiding sidling crabs, the birds in this film are amazing, as are their journies. In the final analysis, this is perhaps one of the finest documentaries I have ever seen - at the very least, it is the most beautiful. See this movie!