Ever finished a day's work and rushed home to the kids just in time for your spouse to leave for work? The emperor penguins of Antarctica know how you feel.
Luc Jacquet's gorgeous documentary, March of the Penguins, follows thousands of waddling, flightless birds on a 70-mile winter journey from their preferred ocean home to a harsh inland breeding ground, where mothers lay a single egg, and then, famished, head back to the sea for food. The males stay behind to oversee the hatching and take care of the newborns. When the mothers return, stomachs full, to feed regurgitated goodies to the chicks, the fathers, who have not eaten in more than four months, head hungrily back to the sea. At winter's end, the males return for a brief but happy reunion.
Yes: happy. One leaves March of the Penguins convinced that true emotion exists in the wider animal kingdom, beyond our own emotion-sodden lives. When, after a late-winter storm, a mother penguin cries over her perished chick and strokes its feathers lightly with her beak, it's hard not to say that these parents are, in some way, as capable of feeling as we are.